Boy in the Box

by Marc E. Fitch

  Death was much easier to understand than life. Hunting was the perfect expression of the beauty of life’s engineering. Even that night in Coombs’ Gulch when they had found the boy dead, he understood the tragic simplicity of it, the perfect functioning. It was as simple as the pull of a trigger. He could take life apart much better than put it together.

  And now he was here, on this mountain, struggling through the trees, following the tracks of his brother, hunting him down the same as he followed deer tracks throughout his life. This wasn’t to end life but to save it, and once again it led to more complications, more gambles, more decisions in which neither option offered a solution. Michael pursued his brother the way his wife pursued a child – with all his physical and mental stamina. The difference, he figured, was that he knew Conner was out there. Conner was a true, living, actualized being who could be found if he just pushed a little harder.

  The trees grew thinner as he followed Conner’s tracks higher up the mountain. Not only were the trees more spread apart but they were also smaller. The soil was shallow against the rock of the steep incline. It was easier to see here. There were fewer places to hide, fewer places where his brother could be out of sight, but still there was no sign of him other than the tracks. He wondered how it was that Conner could keep this pace at this distance and this incline. The mountain face was steep, and Michael slipped in the snow, risked sliding a thousand feet down the slope and cracking his head on the trees.

  The footprints in the snow led up the mountain, seemingly forever. He stared up toward the peak. Clouds swept across, and it disappeared in the gray expanse. Michael wondered where he was for a brief moment. He put his rifle to his shoulder and looked through the scope, tracing the tracks up the slope, but lost them. He dropped the rifle and looked down into the valley where the meadow ran between the mountains and into Coombs’ Gulch. It was far, far below. Michael didn’t realize how far he’d climbed as his legs burned and mind churned with the machinery of his life. He looked through the scope to see if he could spot Jonathan. He saw a small, dark figure standing at the crest of the meadow. So far away and so high up the mountain, struggling against the slippery snow and rock, Michael suddenly doubted himself. Perhaps Jonathan had been right – not about all his supernatural shit, but about making for the cabin and getting help. Michael suddenly felt stranded, lost and alone on this mountaintop. Somehow, being so high up, he began to feel desperate.

  Michael steadied himself, talked himself back into his right mind. This wasn’t hard. This was easy. He wasn’t lost; he knew exactly where he was. He just needed to reach Conner and then go back down the mountain and back toward the cabin. Simple. Michael tamped down his irrational emotions. The tracks did not continue much farther; he could catch up. There was no place left for Conner to hide up here.

  Michael breathed deep, strapped the rifle across his back again and pushed on, stepping into Conner’s tracks when he could. He felt dizzy, breathless. He ignored the growing fear in his gut. Did he make the wrong decision? Was he following a ghost? He had seen Conner. Seen his body, his strange, distorted face. He had followed the tracks. The only logical explanation was that he was on the right path to save his brother. Michael looked back down at the meadow one last time and saw a tiny figure moving quickly through the tall, stiff grass toward the tree line of Coombs’ Gulch. Jonathan would be back to the cabin by dusk. He would get help. Michael would save Conner.

  Michael kept climbing, struggling. Conner’s footprints in the snow appeared steady, casual even, as if his trip up the slope were a comfortable walk through a park rather than the harrowing, dangerous struggle Michael faced. It was almost as if Conner had floated up the mountain, just touching down his boots in the snow. Michael dug into the snow with his hands to find rocks to pull himself up. His boots slipped. He crawled on his knees, slid downhill several yards and panicked before grabbing hold of a shrub to stop his fall. He pulled himself back up and pushed farther. Anyone following his tracks would see a near-death struggle up a mountain that shouldn’t be climbed without proper gear; they would think he’d lost his mind and his tracks would tell the tale of an insane man. Rescuers would look at each other and shake their heads because they wouldn’t understand it; they would deride him with comments about another ‘weekend warrior’ who had no business being this far out in the wilderness. Someone would say there ought to be a law, but no one would know what that law should be. What could guard against these strange instances of human stupidity?

  Would that be it? Would he be another case of sudden and mysterious stupidity in their eyes?

  Michael climbed over a ridge, and the rock flattened out so he could stand. He stopped and caught his breath. Sweat clung to his face, burned his eyes and soaked his clothes. At this elevation, he breathed clouds. The gray sky and snow made everything appear flat. He couldn’t see the contours of the land; the incline was barely perceptible. He could now see the peak of the mountain. The wind howled, pushing against him. It seemed for a moment he had been transported from the Adirondacks to some massive Alaskan peak, tens of thousands of feet high, treeless and surrounded on all sides by an angry sea of rising rock and snow-blown valleys. He was in a different time and different place – a place no man should be, seen only as a last vision by doomed explorers. Michael looked around the world from this massive height and did not recognize Earth anymore. He was at the top of the world, but he knew, logically, he shouldn’t be.

  Conner’s footprints in the snow ascended, and he followed them with his eyes one hundred yards until he saw a figure standing at the base of the peak, staring into the sky. Conner’s back was turned to Michael, but the sight of him after this journey was shocking, almost frightful. The wind kicked up hard and seemed to push Michael back toward the ledge. He called his brother’s name, but it was lost in the lonely expanse of wind and sky.

  Conner didn’t move. He stood motionless as a statue. Michael called to him again but he did not turn. Michael pushed one last time to reach him and struggled up the trail of his easy footsteps. It seemed the entire world was stripped away and there was only Conner standing in this lonely place, staring at something only he could see. As Michael made his way closer, he called for his brother, but still there was no answer, no movement.

  Michael’s legs gave out when he was only a few yards from him. He couldn’t breathe anymore and dropped to his hands and knees. The lack of food, the expenditure of the last ounces of his energy, had pushed him to his final limit. But there was Conner, standing before him, and Michael felt he was on the edge of darkness and had to make one last surge to grasp his brother. Michael stood, reached out and put his hand on Conner’s shoulder.

  Conner turned and gazed at Michael with dead, whitened eyes, his jaw drooping down below his neck. The skin seemed to fall away from the bone like a carcass left in water. His arms and legs were bent at strange angles. He seemed to float, held up by some invisible force. The wind blew, and as it swept across them, Conner’s giant, gaping mouth gave forth a deep, cavernous moan.

  Michael stared, disbelieving, and then Conner held up a long arm and touched him. It was real. The evidence was in front of his eyes, defying the logic of life. Michael fell backward in the snow, staring in horror at the thing that was his brother. It moved closer to him.

  It all came to him at once: perhaps death was not so simple.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Jonathan stood in the snow with the tall grass rising up and bending in the wind and watched Michael run into the trees until he disappeared, swallowed whole by the mountain. The sound of his heavy footfalls, the mad scramble through the brush and branches faded away, and there was nothing but the soft rustle of the frozen meadow. Jonathan was alone now. He felt the world turn, and the mountains seemed to pass by slowly like the sails of a great ship. He felt dizzy, caught between life and death – the same fate that befell Conner and now, most likely, Michael. He tried to convince hi
mself he was still among the living. He thought of Mary and Jacob. He thought of love, but when he tried to feel it, there seemed an impenetrable wall separating him from any emotion besides fear. It was all that was left in him.

  It was an interminable climb up through the meadow – the horizon far above, the grasses pulling against his clothes, the cold reaching into his blood. At the top he would have cell service. He could call for help; he could hear Mary’s voice. He could know that he was still alive. The meadow lay out before him like a strange vision of hell, an encroaching doom on the wind, a cold, lonely and eternal place.

  He heard the whispers rise up from the land itself. He heard Mary’s low and beautiful voice in the darkness, a memory of the night they snuck hand in hand out of a wedding and into the surrounding hills to make love. It was her cousin’s wedding, held in the brick remnants of an ancient factory in the wooded farm hills of Pennsylvania. Sparkling white lights hung from brick edifices. Some of the structures lacked roofs, or were merely an empty foundation with four brick walls that looked ready to collapse; former windows were gateways to nothingness. It was all rust-belt hip, beautiful in its decay. The revelers danced and drank deep into the night on the grave of a once-meaningful existence. The converted factory grounds were surrounded by thick forest, patches of forgotten farm fields and hills that rolled like distant thunder through the night. They were slightly drunk – laughing, touching. He brushed his hands against her ass, tender and strong beneath the silk of her black dress, caressed her thighs and ran his hand up into the warmth of her body. She stifled a laugh; he fumbled with his belt and pants. They fell into the grass beside a bush, and she whispered to him in the darkness, “Take me now and forever.” It was a marriage proposal of sorts – not official, but enough. He disappeared into her in that moment, and all was lost inside. It was a happy moment, one unburdened by the coming future in which everything would be stripped away. She whispered in his ear throughout the entirety of their lovemaking. She told him things. She said she wanted all of him and he promised. Those whispers followed him as he made the long hike to the crest of the meadow.

  He had broken that vow. He had held something back – something dark and dangerous and awful. The lies, the guilt, the remorse ate through what they once had and poisoned the blood, darkened their home, haunted their lives like a specter.

  When they finally married after the incident in Coombs’ Gulch, he took her not as his wife, but as his victim.

  The anguish inside him rose up out of the ground, from rock formed at the beginning of time, when the Earth was young and without love or hate or thought, when it was without time or consequence, when it was merely a tiny stone in a sea of emptiness.

  More thoughts and memories came to him – the slow creep of ruin throughout the years. Conversations in hushed tones around their lonely kitchen table when there was no reason to whisper other than to gently conceal the truth from themselves: “What is going on with you?” “I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me.” “You’re so far away.” “I think there’s something wrong.”

  The tender, foreboding moments that marked his life as a father and husband.

  Deep in the night he woke to the sound of Jacob’s tiny voice, his tongue mispronouncing words in a hurried and hushed tone: “Daddy, I’m scared.” And Jonathan opened his eyes and slowly took in the shape of his head, so perfectly formed and whole, lacking the star-shaped hole in the left eye that haunted Jonathan’s dreams. Jacob’s face was so close to his they nearly touched, and his eyes seemed to shine in the dark of the room.

  “What are you scared of?”

  The single word uttered by a boy summed up all the horrors of the world: “Monsters.”

  And now, walking through the meadow, nearly reaching the crest of the hill, Jonathan shared that fear. Before, he feared the guilt, the prospect of being caught, shamed, convicted, banished to prison, of being alone. Now he feared something more – the monsters that lurk in the spaces between, in unseen dimensions and in his own soul. He was the monster, more than anything else. Jacob had been right to fear – the monster slept in his home.

  Jonathan’s pace slowed as he neared the horizon, where the meadow rolled over and began its descent into Coombs’ Gulch. He turned and looked back toward the lake, but couldn’t see it anymore. He looked to the mountain to his right and wondered where Michael might be – if he, too, was chasing a monster that was more a part of himself than anything else. He listened and tried to hear the reeds in the wind, hoping for an answer, or a glimmer of hope, but all that came to him were memories of his past that, pieced together, now seemed to form a tragic and predestined downward spiral.

  He reached the top exhausted, sapped of will. It seemed as good a place as any to die. Everything felt wrong, but he wanted to hear their voices. He breathed hard the cold air. Jonathan dug through his pack and found his cell phone to see if it would pick up a signal. He held it aloft in the air until a lifeline appeared and immediately dialed Mary’s number.

  The phone began to vibrate and ding with incoming messages, voice mails and missed calls. Over and over it shook and rang and dinged – civilization surging back at him, connected through the air.

  Mary answered by screaming his name, screaming that Jacob was gone. Someone had taken him.

  As Jonathan, Conner and Michael lay on that rocky beach with horrific visions creeping through their brains, as Conner attempted to drop the boy in the box to the bottom of a lake, as Jonathan had stared into the darkest part of the night and felt a horrific presence staring back, Jacob had disappeared. He boarded the bus at 7:30 a.m., attended his classes, played outside during recess under the eye of teachers patrolling the playground, attended more classes and boarded the bus home at 2:30 p.m.The driver let Jacob off at the corner, two doors from his home. Mary normally met him at the bus stop. She had been extra vigilant lately because of the sounds outside the house at night and the scratch marks on the door. But while she stood in the kitchen, putting away the last of the dishes from the dishwasher, she looked out the rear window to the woods behind the house and saw the figure of a man limping through the trees. It was a bright day. The trees were just beginning to shed their leaves and the thick underbrush was wilted and dead. But there in the long shadows cast by the afternoon sun, she had seen a figure moving in and out of the darkness. She was tired. She thought her eyes were playing tricks. It had always been a quiet neighborhood. Everyone knew each other.

  But she saw him walking with a strange gait, and she stopped her work and watched, an anxiety growing in her heart that her house and her life were being encroached upon by the unknown. It was like the figure knew she had seen him. It stopped walking, turned and looked and stared right through the window and into her eyes. She could see those eyes in the shadow of the trees. It was like they glowed, she said.

  And suddenly it was gone and she snapped out of her daze. The steaming dishes from the washer gone cold, the afternoon just a bit darker, the sun a bit closer to the horizon.

  She looked at the clock. It had been fifteen minutes and Jacob should be home. The bus had already come and gone. Dizzy at the sudden time shift and now afraid there was some unknown person stalking through the neighborhood where her seven-year-old son was getting off the bus, she ran out the front door toward the corner bus stop. The neighborhood was bright and empty. She heard the diesel engine of the school bus roaring two streets over, continuing its route. Normally, two other children disembarked at the same corner, but she saw no one at all. She heard no voices. She was completely alone.

  The police were interviewing everyone, she said – teachers, the bus driver, parents, neighbors. They retraced his steps throughout the day. Mary sat for hours at the kitchen table as detectives ran through her day, asked where her husband was, debated with her the timing and nature of her absence at the bus stop. She told them she had seen someone in the woods and reminded the officers of
the man who had approached Aria less than a week earlier. She told them there had been strange noises outside the house at night. She showed them the scratch marks on the door. They frowned at her answers; skepticism hung on their voices. What did this man in the woods look like? She couldn’t give a clear answer. It was impossible to tell, the shadow and light crossing his face, his eyes glowing bright, boring into her. Police and local volunteers combed through the woods, made their way to the wetlands that stretched between two low ridges, the place where small liquor bottles littered the ground and fallen trees served as benches for small gatherings around a fire. Search dogs were brought out, picking up the scent from Jacob’s tiny red shirt, pulling their handlers deeper into the places hidden between beacons of homes and neighborhoods and then farther out into the surrounding hills.

  They wanted to know where Jonathan was, how long he had been gone. “How is your marriage?” they asked her. “Did you have an argument with your husband before he left?”

  “Where are you?” she cried, but he could not answer. He didn’t know just then. He just knew he was away – too far gone to make any difference whatsoever.

  “I’m lost,” he said quietly.

  And then Mary screamed. It rose up from her gut, from her heart, from her whole being – summing up the past years and everything with it. It was a familiar sound, an animal-like scream that cried out through the distance and echoed across the mountains. It had been with him all along. That pain-filled shriek that heralded the coming of horrors and the torture of loss.

  It was the sound only a mother could make, and the earth shook with its vibration.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  He ran, tumbling and tripping through the snow and grass down the slope. He dropped his pack; his rifle remained strapped tight to his back. The long reeds of the meadow whipped across his thighs. Unknown muscles, suddenly shocked to life, tried to balance, push, lift and absorb. His ankles rolled, feet slipped, but it didn’t matter – he kept going because he didn’t know what else to do. He ran to escape this place and to get home to find his son; he ran to escape the trappings of his past and the presence that stalked him through the trees. He wanted to believe that if he could get home the nightmare would end, but a voice in the back of his mind – one he sought to ignore and deny with all his heart – told him it was already too late and the true nightmare, the kind in which you walk through the darkness, eyes open to a world beyond, was just beginning. Perhaps, if he could get home in time, he could save Jacob. Perhaps he could save Mary from the terror and the loss. He was unsure if he could save himself. All would be revealed in due time. He would be exposed once again, not as a good man but as his true self – weak, destitute and dying. Evil is patient, secure in its timelessness, content to slowly strip away the facade piece by piece until death is a relief.