Boy in the Box

by Marc E. Fitch

  “Jesus,” Jonathan said beneath his breath.

  “Nah, he ain’t out there,” Daryl said with a smile, “at least not for these guys.” But Jonathan was more concerned about their trip sending them into uncharted territory.

  “Anyway,” Daryl continued, “when they found those guys, the ones who were alive were damn near starved to death and frozen. The other two had nothing to worry about anymore. But the two fellas that were alive – ain’t never seen nothing like it. They were barely able to speak, just kept mumbling about the mountains. We traced their tracks through the snow back to the other two. They were stone cold dead, sitting upright. The look on their faces – I tell you something – looked like they died of fright. Mouths wide open, eyes wide open, blue with frost. That was the last time anybody went wandering around Coombs’ Gulch. When the state and those developers came in looking to buy it up, Bill saw the opportunity, milked them for as much as he could. That’s Bill for ya, though. Never met a deal he couldn’t milk for something better.”

  They listened to Daryl Teague drone on and on. He wasn’t the strong, silent type. The black trees blurred as they traveled; Conner and Jonathan bounced in the back seat over the potholes with spine-jarring shocks as they turned onto the dirt road toward the cabin.

  “You guys know the history of Coombs’ Gulch, right? How it got its name?”

  “Christ, there’s more?” Conner said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to spin some Indian legend?”

  Daryl eyed Conner and smiled from the corner of his mouth. “Nah. No Indian legends up here. They avoided the place except for wars between tribes. Nah. The Gulch got its name from Charles Coombs III – a very peculiar fella.”

  A soft glow appeared out of the trees ahead. The outdoor lights of the cabin cast an electric glow in the darkness, the trees like ghosts, the ground beneath bare and lifeless dirt. The inside of the cabin was lit as well, the windows like yellow eyes. Parked in front of the cabin was an old rusting pickup.

  “See? What did I tell ya? Bill’s up here. He’s just a forgetful old drunk, is all. Probably mixed everything up and thought you were coming out tomorrow.”

  “I thought Bill had a memory like a steel trap,” Michael said.

  Daryl glanced over at Michael. “Eh, some memories chew their legs off to get out of that trap.”

  Jonathan didn’t care, though; he was just happy to finally be at the cabin, to unload their gear, bed down for the night and get this journey over with. Already, he dreaded the long battle ahead. The hike would be difficult enough, but having to dig up that box and haul it the miles and miles over wilderness terrain was something he felt physically unprepared for. He was tired, but he feared going to sleep because he knew in the morning they would have to begin.

  Daryl banged on the door to the cabin with his massive fist, yelling for Bill to wake up. “He’s got a spare key hidden around here,” Daryl said, and he walked around the side of the cabin. In the darkness, they could hear the drone of the gas generator in the shed behind the house – the same shed where they’d hung their deer ten years ago and stripped them of skin, the same shed where they retrieved the pickaxe and shovels to bury the boy in that box. The faint cracking of the generator was better than the pure silence and darkness that awaited.

  Then Daryl was standing in the open doorway of the cabin, having entered from the back door. “Don’t know where he is. Don’t see him anywhere in here.” He took a flashlight and said he was going to look for Bill.

  Jonathan didn’t much care, none of them did, and they began to haul their gear inside. Michael stacked some of the boxes and grocery bags on the kitchen table. Jonathan fell down into the old couch, relieved after a full day of sitting in the car and then experiencing the incident in town. Conner was opening a beer, clearly trying to kill the stress.

  Then Daryl was once again standing in front of them in the yellow light of the cabin, taking up the whole room with his presence. But somehow, in that moment, he seemed diminished, as if he were fading or shrinking.

  “Bill’s out back,” he said quietly. “He’s dead. Stone dead.”

  Bill Flood – seventy-two years old – sat upright on a simple wood bench beside the stone-circled firepit, shrouded in darkness behind the cabin, staring out into the deep expanse of Coombs’ Gulch. At first, from behind the bouncing circles of light from the flashlights, he looked like any old man sitting on a bench – someone you might see in a park on a lonely, overcast day, throwing breadcrumbs to ducks in a pond, shoulders stooped, silver hair combed back and kept trim with regular visits to the barbershop, which were usually unnecessary but offered an excuse to converse with others. The firepit was filled with leaves and refuse that spilled over the rock perimeter. Bill sat there, his back to the cabin – to them – and, despite Daryl’s insistence the man was dead, Jonathan still held the expectation that Bill would turn around and look at them with foggy eyes and croak some distant, hollow words from a constricted throat.

  They circled the firepit to see his face, but he did not move. He sat still as a statue, frozen in time and somehow balanced on the bench, his frosted-over eyes staring out at dark mountains. They all stood in a semicircle around him, running the flashlight beams over his body, looking for any sign of what had happened and seeing nothing obvious. Their breath formed clouds in the cold night. A chill passed through Jonathan like a frozen spike touching the base of his spine. He followed Bill’s dead gaze and turned to look out into the forest of the night, and there, in the darkness, he saw it.

  The world twisted and fractured and opened up like a doorway through time and space. He saw trees reaching through; he saw figures, impossibly tall, cloaked in stars, like an elaborately designed fabric. And in the twisting darkness, he saw the face of Thomas Terrywile appear, formed out of the trees and mountains, pieced together like a child’s puzzle. His eyes were large as the moon, his mouth grinning with a thousand teeth. An image of death veiled with the skin of an innocent boy.

  Chapter Twelve

  Charles Coombs III claimed the Gulch in 1824 as the Dutch were moving into the northern New York region with mining and timber operations. Coombs was a third-generation heir to a British textile manufacturing empire, but he eschewed his father’s and grandfather’s business to create a great new society, a society of communal living that would allow him to be at one with nature. In effect, he rebelled against his father and family, seeking a new life overseas with a vast amount of wealth at his disposal. He traveled to America, where he became enraptured with the transcendentalist movement, with its focus on the natural world and the perfection of humanity through communing with nature. The presence of and access to Native American tribes and belief systems drove him upstate as he sought out the Iroquois, north of Lake Champlain. He stopped for a period of time in Albany, where he purchased a hotel and created the Society of the New Dawn, drawing a few members at first and then progressively growing as Coombs made trips back and forth into the wilderness, seeking native wisdom and returning with stories, prophesies, and insights he shared with his followers. Although the Society was largely an intellectual endeavor at first, as it grew it began to change. Historians of the United States’ transcendental movement noted that much of Coombs’ teachings did not appear to mirror anything he could have gained from the Iroquois, who, at the time, were consolidating their people – decimated by war and infection brought by European settlers – and looking to abandon New York for the West.

  In fact, no one is really sure who Charles Coombs was talking to during his trips into the wilderness. There is brief mention in a fur trader’s journal of an Englishman making numerous attempts to speak with Iroquois leaders and being turned away. At that point, the Native American tribes had grown tired of dealing with European settlers and deeply distrusted them for obvious reasons. Still, Coombs would be gone for months at a time and return to Albany dirty, haggard, half starved and seemingly delirious
. But he also came with visions and philosophies, preaching against the rise of industrialism, capitalism and greed. His Society of the New Dawn began to take on religious connotations. He led members in prayerlike rituals that began to grow loud and ferocious, leading to complaints from surrounding city dwellers. Like other groups that sprouted during that time, Coombs and his followers began moving toward a completely open society, one in which families were communal arrangements, marriage was abolished and child-rearing was shared. But his utopian ideals were anchored by something darker. He talked of gods in the wilderness, beings that moved through the trees and haunted the mountains. Supernatural forces that could touch humanity, move the world with an unseen hand. Very few people recorded his teachings; what remains is a compendium of loosely linked, circular ramblings with no apparent underlying mythology. He tried to talk about time but made little sense. He talked about gods, but they were all foreign to any formal religions. The largely Christian population in Albany became concerned.

  Following an incident in which Coombs was accused of ‘crimes against morality’, he and his followers were forced to leave Albany or face possible arrest. Coombs took his group, now numbering nearly one hundred and twenty, and fled for the Adirondack Mountains, a place where he said they could commune with the true gods of nature and life. The choice to relocate to the harsh and uncharted Adirondacks was also strange. The native tribes avoided the mountains except for the purposes of war. The harsh terrain made farming difficult and the winters brutal. The Society of the New Dawn traveled as far as they could by train and then wagon and then finally by foot until Coombs finally found the Gulch – a seemingly self-contained area of woodland with a brook flowing through the middle – and declared that this was where they would settle and create their new society.

  They lasted only two years. Fur traders at the time – and families seeking out loved ones who had absconded with the Society – described a few ramshackle cabins that would likely not hold up for the winter, a meager attempt at a farm, and strange nightly rituals that involved worshippers gathering to form geometric shapes and chanting in low, deep tones in an effort to ‘commune with the Great Spirit’. Visitors who witnessed the events usually left the commune shaken and disturbed, refusing to return to the area. “What they summoned, I could not begin to say,” wrote Daniel Jansen, a fur trader and woodsman. “Only that it was an abomination to the one true God. Following their ritual, they engaged in unspeakable carnal acts as if possessed by spirits. The whole land is haunted with witches and demons they have called forth. It is not safe. Coombs’ Gulch should be avoided.”

  Indeed, it was not safe, as members of the Society of the New Dawn began to die off quickly during the harsh winter. Accidents plagued the community as high-minded intellectual elites attempted to tame the wilderness with few survival skills. Hunger ravaged their ranks. Those who attempted to leave that first winter became lost in the mountains and died quickly of exposure during an unusually bad winter. Suicide became rampant as some, delirious with their beliefs, tried to become one with Coombs’ gods.

  But it was over the course of the second year that the children began disappearing into the woods. Infants, toddlers and adolescents began, one by one, to be unaccounted for, seemingly vanished, sometimes in broad daylight, sometimes during the night. Their frenzied parents and community leaders searched the Gulch endlessly and found nothing. Their rituals grew more fevered – violent, at times – as worshippers tried to appease the spirits to bring back their children. Visions of strange worlds and horrific beings became commonplace. The death toll rose.

  Following the second year in the Gulch, all communication with the outside world ceased. A Dutch timber company working its way north eventually found the cabins but no signs of life, except for a few journals and remnants of a community. Among the journals was Coombs’ own diary. After reading the last entry, the timber company turned away and left to find other areas. “We see them in the night,” the diary read. “The dead come forth, the children play. Time is nothing to it. Mankind merely a toy. It takes many forms, but none more terrifying than our own.… It was all a great mistake.”

  “Jesus, fuck,” Jonathan said. “We can’t do this anymore. This is dumb. We should just leave and risk it.”

  “Fuck that,” Michael said.

  “This place is bad. This is all bad. It’s like luck or a curse or whatever, but it follows you, and it’s damn sure following us!”

  “Shut the fuck up; that doesn’t even make sense.”

  The three of them were inside the cabin now, sitting at the table in the small kitchen. Daryl Teague had gone to fetch the police. Now their names would be recorded in some kind of official report, a record of their trip to Coombs’ Gulch a matter of legal proceedings.

  “I saw something out there. I know this sounds crazy, but I saw—”

  “You saw nothing. This is just an exercise in stress and you’re cracking.”

  “Listen. I’m not cracking. I’m not losing it. I’m telling you that we’ve already had enough problems. This is not going the way it should be. There’s some kind of curse following us. Call it whatever you will.”

  “There you go. I’ll call it crazy, thank you.”

  “Let’s not go off the deep end,” Conner finally said.

  Jonathan’s mind was fracturing and spinning like a child’s kaleidoscope. He tried to tell them about Thomas Terrywile, about how other missing children suddenly appeared on hunting cameras in the lost reaches of the world where only avid hunters would venture; the blued image of that little girl, dressed like it was 1972, kicking up her leg in a joyous leap; the Texan whom he spoke with on the phone, who had no reason to lie and little desire for attention. He told them, but it just came out as gibberish, and he couldn’t blame them for not believing – who would?

  What he had seen outside, in the forest and mountains, was like looking into a shattered mirror, the world in a thousand different angles and pieces, and yet, somehow, it provided a truer glimpse into reality – the true world. But it wasn’t just the shattered mirror – something that could be perceived as a twist of fate or a spate of bad luck – it was the fact that behind it all he saw a malevolent force, a face dressed like little Thomas Terrywile. It was a pantomime, an exaggerated Halloween costume, a mask worn by something awful to mock them. The eyes were black holes, the teeth like a shark’s mouth implanted into a boy’s face. It was grotesque, an abomination of what is and what should have been.

  “It’s getting late. Too late. Maybe you should get some sleep,” Conner said.

  Jonathan tried to right himself, to get his mind back, but it felt as though his sanity were spiraling down a drain.

  “We need you right. We need your head right,” Conner said.

  “You sure your head is right with all this?” Jonathan said. “I don’t think right has anything to do with any of this.”

  Jonathan stood up and brushed soot and ash from his clothes. They said he had stumbled backward, tripped over the rocks lining the firepit and fell. They said he was screaming, but he didn’t recall any sound or any voice, just that vortex of darkness taking in the trees and the mountains and the face grinning ear to ear.

  Bill sat beside the firepit, staring into the Gulch. They hadn’t moved the body and could barely make out his form or the pastel colors of his plaid shirt in the light from the cabin. But it was impossible not to notice him sitting there. Somehow, he was constantly in sight, whether from the corner of your eye or in the background, just over someone’s shoulder. No matter which way you turned, where you looked, there was dead, dumb Bill sitting on a bench outside in the cold. Daryl Teague had left in his pickup truck, surprisingly distraught for a man who looked more animal than human. There was no cell phone signal to call the police; none of them knew how to get the radio to connect with any receiver beside the one at Bill’s apartment, so Daryl drove off into the night and they were
left babysitting a dead man.

  Jonathan grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the grocery bag and took a long drink. He slammed the bottle on the table. “Fine. I’m better now. I’ll shut up. You don’t want to listen to it, that’s fine.”

  Michael was shaking his head, on the verge of belting him.

  “Do you remember what it felt like that night?”

  “Shut up. We all remember things differently. It is what it is, and there’s no use remembering it now.”

  “Do you remember the night? Do you remember what it’s like out there at night? We’re going to be out there – far out there – with no way to get back here.”

  “It’s just the woods,” Michael said.

  “It’s not just the woods. It’s heavier. It’s like being at the bottom of the ocean.”

  “This is bullshit.”

  “There are things that live there, too,” Jonathan said.

  “And that’s how you explain the boy out there?” Michael was yelling now. “What did we do, fish him up from the bottom of the ocean?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t the bottom,” Jonathan said. “Maybe it was just somewhere else. Or maybe it was both. It doesn’t have to make sense to us.”

  “Well, thank God because you’re not making sense to me.”

  “Think about it,” Jonathan said. “What is your best explanation for what he was doing out here in the middle of the night? What is your explanation for why no one ever looked for him? If he went missing in 1985, no one would be—”

  “Do you have the picture? Do you have the article so we can read it?” Michael asked. Michael stood up, looming over Jonathan now, hand reaching out, asking for Jonathan’s phone. “Can we see all this research you’ve done?”

  “There’s no service here.”

  “Brilliant.”