Boy in the Box

by Marc E. Fitch

  Gene’s words stayed with Jonathan through the years. He thought about them and wondered, years on, what exactly Gene was saying that night, what he was talking about. Was it just the boy? Just the shot he fired? Or was it something more, something bigger?

  Jonathan woke in the deepest part of the night. His eyes could not see, but he felt the damp cold of the tent canvas reaching through his skin, and he could hear Michael’s harsh whisper in his ear – “Stay quiet.” He realized the brothers were awake; he could feel them sitting upright in the tent, tense, breathing quickly, staring at the zippered entrance.

  There was a sound outside like a great rushing wind, swirling around the tent as if they were caught in a tornado. The canvas wall bulged inward, then shuddered and rippled. Outside, the rush continued, and he could feel vibrations in the ground beneath him and remembered the night in Coombs’ Gulch when it had seemed every animal suddenly came awake and stampeded through the darkness. Suddenly it seemed like time was repeating itself over and over – a different situation, but the same nonetheless. It all kept coming back. Michael slowly chambered a round in his rifle. The tumult swirled outside. The tent shook.

  Then Jonathan felt hands – small, but immensely powerful and cold. He turned his head toward the tent wall beside him, which glowed in the moonlight. Two palms and ten small fingers pressed through the canvas harder and harder, reaching inward for him. Beneath the sound of the swirling force that rushed through the grass, a whisper came, slight and high-pitched, childish and achingly familiar – “Daddy.”

  Conner and Michael tried to stop him as he rushed for the opening of the tent. They pleaded in desperate whispers, but Jonathan felt something deep in his core pulling him outside, something he could not deny, something that did not know fear or trepidation. It moved inside him, twisted like a worm impaled on a hook. They pulled at his arms, but he thrashed against them.

  Jonathan fell out into the darkness, onto his hands and knees, the long grass brushing against his face, slowing his movements like water, and he screamed Jacob’s name into the night like an insane man might cry out at a hallucination.

  But all was silent and still. There was no wind. There was no noise or stampede of animals. He was alone in the night, only his own frenzied breath falling into the air. He scrambled to his feet and ran around the tent, searching and screaming, but there was nothing. The distant moon cast a ghostly pallor. The field seemed to stretch on forever. The grass shone and sparkled with frost in the pale light. Jonathan’s voice died in the distance.

  Then Michael and Conner were outside with their rifles raised. Jonathan stopped, like a man suddenly waking from a dream, returning to the mundane world. They waited in silence, breath exhaled in clouds of mist, cold overtaking their bodies.

  “What the hell happened?” Conner said.

  “It was him,” Jonathan said. He struggled for breath. “It was Jacob; I heard him. He was here. He spoke to me.”

  Far off in the field was a deep, throaty chuff and heavy footsteps through the grass. Michael raised the flashlight, but it did not reach far enough into the night. They listened as it moved east, back toward the Gulch, slouching at a slow, heavy pace down the slope of the meadow. A vixen scream went up from deep within the valley and reverberated in the air. It sounded more human than animal now. Jonathan felt cold hands close around his heart. There was no air. He could not catch his breath.

  “I don’t know what that is,” Michael said.

  He took the flashlight and searched the field around the tent for tracks, but the sea of grass was undisturbed; it swayed lightly in the cold breeze, whispering, as it had for a thousand years.

  “We didn’t just dream that, did we?” Conner said.

  “I can’t tell anymore,” Michael said.

  Somewhere in the depths of the Gulch, the high-pitched scream rose again, shocking and anguished, full of fear and longing.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The man from the woods was outside the window again last night. Jacob had watched him walking stiff-legged along the edge of their backyard in the darkness, stopping and staring at the window where Jacob sat on his bed and watched. Then he would turn and continue his strange walk and disappear back into the darkness, just like the past few nights. Jacob was never able to truly see his face. Somehow it looked familiar, and Jacob combed through his memory of adults – neighbors, friends of Mommy’s and Daddy’s, parents of other kids at school, teachers – but he couldn’t find that face anywhere. It looked different, almost broken, like when he had knocked over a ceramic stein on the bookshelf and he and his mother tried to piece it back together with glue before Daddy returned home and became angry.

  Maybe it was some kind of monster. Normally he would be scared, but monsters didn’t walk like people. Monsters were large, fanged, multi-legged things that stalked in the darkness, in closets and under beds. This was just a man – one he thought he recognized – walking along the woods.

  When he first began to see the man several days ago, he told his mother. “Did you have another bad dream, honey?” she said and kneeled down so that she was eye level with him.

  Jacob was told he had bad dreams at night, but he couldn’t remember them. He would just suddenly wake, sometimes in another room, usually with his mother and father standing over him with tired eyes, looking worried or possibly annoyed. Sometimes, he would wake to his father yelling at him, telling him to snap out of it, but Jacob wasn’t sure what he was supposed to snap out of. It was like being transported by magic to another room in the middle of the night. His face would be wet with tears, his body would be shaking, and he would be terrified, but he didn’t know why. He couldn’t remember anything after lying down in his bed and falling asleep. But then he would be awake, and all the night was disturbed and it was his fault. His body and his brain were doing things he couldn’t control and didn’t remember. But he knew they were scary things. He woke with the terror inside him. He woke knowing something had happened; he just didn’t know what. He supposed if you couldn’t remember them, then maybe it didn’t matter.

  “No. I don’t think it was a dream. I don’t usually remember scary dreams.”

  “Some you remember and some you don’t.” She looked tired, and Jacob wondered about those nights when he woke in fright and saw his parents standing over him. She looked tired but also sad, and sometimes he would catch her just staring out the window into the trees for long periods of time – the same trees the strange man disappeared into each night. He wondered what she was thinking. He wondered if maybe she had seen the man, too. Or maybe she knew him and that was why he seemed familiar.

  “I’ll keep an eye out for anything, okay?” she said. “But if you see him again, you come and tell me and show me, okay? It might just be one of the neighbors.”

  The police had been here yesterday because some animal put scratches in the door. The police were big, strong in their stiff uniforms, and Jacob, like most boys, focused almost exclusively on their guns, the shape of them in those holsters, wanting to one day be able to proudly walk around with that kind of power at his fingertips. He didn’t know why; he just did. Daddy had guns, but they were locked up in the basement and he hardly ever took them out, except for this week when he went on a trip.

  Jacob had watched his father clean those guns one time. He took them out of the safe and methodically, silently went over them bit by bit, taking them apart and wiping the metal with a rag and spraying its precise parts with a can of special oil that gave off a smell and left Jacob with a headache. He wanted to hold them, to feel the metal and pretend to shoot bad guys.

  “Some other time,” Daddy said. “When you’re older.” Jacob wondered if that would ever happen. Daddy would always say ‘later’ when Jacob wanted to do something with him, and later never seemed to come. His father would just sit on the couch, drinking from one of his ‘Daddy drinks’ until after Jacob went to bed. I
t was like lying, but not quite. That was the strange thing about his father – he always seemed to be lying, to be hiding something. It was nothing that Jacob could actually point to and say ‘liar’ but just a feeling that there was some great big secret and everyone knew it but him.

  But his father was gone now on his hunting trip, and for some reason Jacob felt a sense of relief, as if he could breathe easier without this large, lumbering man who seemed to be angry all the time, stalking around inside the house. At least the man from the woods was outside, beyond locked doors and windows.

  It was Friday morning, and Jacob ate a bowl of cereal grown soggy with milk. His mother was drinking coffee and tapping on her phone with her thumb. It was almost seven thirty in the morning, and she finally told him to get ready for school. Jacob tried in vain every morning to pretend school wasn’t coming, but his mother always remembered, always told him it was time to get ready and go, and then he would wander out into the cold, walk to the corner with the stop sign and wait with the other kids for the big, yellow bus. His mother would watch him some mornings from the driveway. Other mornings when it was too cold, she would sit with him in the car at the corner. Jacob didn’t like school. It was a lot of sitting, being forced to do work, being made to pay attention to things that didn’t interest him. He liked his imagination. He liked to spend all day in his room, imagining adventures, playing with Legos, creating worlds in which he was a powerful hero bent on overcoming an enemy and saving the day.

  School was strange. The teachers, the other kids, all seemed to be in on some big secret, too. They all seemed to know so much more than him, even the kids in his same grade. They gathered in circles and talked and laughed, and Jacob generally had no idea what they were talking about and why it was funny. He tried to laugh along, to pretend that he was part of it, that he knew about a particular television show or video game, but he didn’t, and it usually showed fairly quickly; the other kids would look at him as if he were an alien and move on. He was invariably left out. Jacob asked his parents for a phone like his mother and father had, but they refused. He asked for a video game system, but they said they didn’t have the money. He asked to watch particular movies, but was only shown movies for little kids. He was left out of the know; everyone else had a head start and Jacob couldn’t catch up.

  The teachers were nice enough, but they insisted he do work and learn things that all seemed foreign. Perhaps he was an alien, accidentally left here for some reason, or transported from some other time and place, the same way he would close his eyes and wake in fright in some other part of the house.

  Jacob wasn’t sure where he was from, what he was doing in this world. He didn’t feel a part of it. He didn’t really feel a part of his family. His father seemed angry about something, his mother tired and sad and he, above all else, felt alone with the feeling that something wasn’t right.

  Jacob dropped his shoulders, cleared his bowl and spoon, and shuffled off to his room to put on the clothes his mother had laid out for him the night before. His room was bright with sunlight now. He looked through the windows to the trees beyond the small space of yard in the back. The leaves were all different colors, and every day there were less of them and he could see deeper and deeper into the woods. In the spring and summer, he played out there. There were large rocks to climb, bushy enclaves he used as forts in his imaginary games and battles, but he hadn’t been out there much since it turned colder. After the police came, his mother told him he couldn’t play outside alone anymore. There was some animal or something out there – perhaps a hungry bear. There were lots of bears out there, supposedly, but he had yet to see one.

  He was more concerned about the man who came from the woods at night and walked along the perimeter of the yard in that strange way, like one of those puppets held up by strings; the parts move and you have to pretend it’s alive. He had seen a puppet show like that at school once. There was a tiny stage and curtain in the front of the classroom and this weird, funny, fat man was there making the puppets dance and move on stage. Jacob watched the puppets but he also watched the man whose face hovered just over the curtains as he told a story and the puppets acted it out. The man smiled in a strange way and the puppets moved by his unseen hands. Maybe that was who was outside the window at night, Jacob thought. Maybe it was the puppet man.

  His mother kissed him goodbye and watched him from the driveway as he stood with three other children at the stop sign, waiting for his bus. Jacob said hello to them but didn’t speak much after that. He kept his hands busy by adjusting his backpack. It was cold out today. Not cold enough to see his breath, but cold enough to make the wait seem eternal. The bus could be heard across the whole neighborhood. The rolling hills and trees didn’t block its big diesel engine and squealing brakes. When it pulled up he was the last to climb the steps into that big tube on wheels that smelled like vinyl and rubber. His mother stood at the top of the driveway, arms crossed to keep her hands warm, and watched him as he passed by encased in glass and steel.

  Jacob had yet to fully understand the large building that was the Region 12 Consolidated Elementary School. Their town was small and shared the school with neighboring Burlington. It was his first year at this place, which still seemed huge and strange despite his having come here nearly every day for the past two and a half months. The first few days left him in tears, trying to find his way to his classroom, trying to understand the rules, trying to decipher the orders from his teacher and the directions his classmates constantly spilled out at him as if they had been attending classes for years. Now, at least, he knew the routine. But still, the school branched off into long, dark hallways, doors appeared out of nowhere, and in the bathrooms older kids would mingle and laugh and stare as he stood before the urinal. When he had to pee, he waited until the midpoint of class so that he could be relatively sure he’d be alone. Without the throngs of other kids stumbling through the hallways, bumping, talking over one another, pushing him this way and that with their over-large bodies, the cheaply tiled hallways seemed to yawn like the open mouth of a cave, hiding doors to other worlds. His first week at this school, Jacob accidentally went to the wrong class and sat down at a desk. He still couldn’t understand why they had to go to different classrooms to learn different things; why didn’t the teachers just walk to the classroom he was in so he didn’t have to navigate the maze of doors and classroom numbers? But he sat down with a sick, uncomfortable feeling in his stomach. Somehow, he already knew he was in the wrong place. Things just didn’t look right. The kids looked slightly bigger than him, slightly more knowledgeable. They looked at him and then seemed to purposely ignore his presence, but he was lost at this point and didn’t know what else to do, so he waited.

  As soon as the teacher began her lesson, he knew he was in the wrong place. But now, with an entire classroom of older boys and girls, all with two eyes with which to stare at him, he kept his silence. Finally, the teacher’s eyes found him sitting in the second-to-last row.

  “I don’t recognize you,” she said. Her hair was so blonde it was practically white and there were lines in her face that deepened when she spoke to him. “What’s your name?”

  “Jacob Hollis.”

  “Are you sure you’re in the right class, Jacob?”

  “Umm…”

  “How old are you?” Now he was being grilled, and he felt his stomach tightening.

  “Seven…”

  “No. You’re in the wrong class. What class are you supposed to be in?”

  Jacob didn’t know.

  “Well, march down to the main office and talk to them. They’ll get you to the right place.” Her voice was harsh, and she watched as Jacob stood from the desk that wasn’t his own and walked back out the door. The other kids laughed quietly as he left. No one held his hand; no one told him where to go or what to do. It was just him, alone, in this monstrosity of a place.

  That feeling had no
t yet left him and he wondered if it ever would. He wondered what this place was supposed to do for him, why there was so much emphasis on coming here, enduring here. In this place, surrounded by other kids, he felt alone.

  There was something different about today, though. Although he was never happy or comfortable here, he had begun to grow accustomed to it. It had at least become a familiar, unwanted feeling, but today he felt something else, something more twisted and frightening than the usual alienation and confusion he normally felt. Maybe it was his dad being gone – the way he had packed up his things, his instruments for killing animals, and left early for some faraway place. Maybe it was the memory of the man from the woods still stalking through his mind. With his father gone, that lumbering figure in the darkness suddenly seemed more frightening. Even though Jacob always sensed something wrong about his dad, he at least knew that his father loved him and would protect him, protect the house. He was big. He was strong. He could do that. Now, with his father gone someplace far away, Jacob had an unsettled feeling that everything was wide open, like the door to the house was open and anyone could just walk inside. Perhaps it was the look on his mother’s face as the bus pulled away on the street. It was like a photograph in his mind; one thing about looking at pictures is that you look at them to remember people you haven’t seen in a long time. He missed her suddenly, overwhelmingly, and wanted to be in her arms, to have her hold him in his house where he could feel safe.