Boy in the Box

by Marc E. Fitch

  Mary shook her head slowly. “I don’t see how Jonathan could have anything to do with it. He was gone. I don’t know what happened up there, but he didn’t take Jacob.”

  “What about the suspicious site found near the Aspetuck River Valley just this week? Police dogs traced your son to that location – what looks like a ritualistic site. A place your husband told them they would find. The body of his recently deceased friend was dug up just days before your husband’s hunting trip and your son’s disappearance. Doesn’t all that seem a bit strange or suspicious to you?”

  “I don’t see how…”

  “Is it possible your husband had something to do with the disappearance of Jacob?”

  That fake little bitch was pushing hard now. Her questions came fast and with a twinge of anger. Or perhaps it was condescension. What did this reporter want her to say, anyway? That her husband had gone insane? That he was somehow responsible? Mary didn’t know what happened in those mountains other than Jonathan’s ravings. Perhaps that was what the audience wanted. They wanted her to fuel these strange conspiracy theories, the internet stories that talked about some strange cult and ritual human sacrifice, bloggers who posited Jonathan was a murderer of children. That Jonathan, Gene, Michael and Conner were all part of some satanic pact, that they had arranged it so that Jacob would be taken by others while they were in Coombs’ Gulch, thereby removing all suspicion, that something had gone wrong between them and Jonathan had killed them both. The world thought he was mentally ill at best or a monster at worst.

  But none of that was true. She knew that. She knew Jonathan. He had his faults, and things had been bad between them at the end. His drinking had grown out of hand. He was like a shadow that somehow crowded the house. He was angry over something. He seemed to harbor some kind of deep, dark sadness, which he never revealed – but she knew him. He was incapable of the things the world suggested. He could never hurt a child, much less his own. He loved Jacob as much as any decent father, maybe more. And he had loved her, too. She remembered their times together – dating, the wedding, their honeymoon, Jacob’s birth. They were once happy and very much in love.

  The image of the last time she saw Jonathan flashed through her mind: head down, woozy with drugs, dressed in a hospital gown and escorted by orderlies the size of linebackers. Something happened in those mountains. Perhaps she didn’t know him anymore, and, in these last weeks as she faced the cold, lonely terror alone, she wondered if, perhaps, she had ever truly known him at all.

  But that was not yet an admission she was willing to make.

  Mary refused to sacrifice her history, everything she knew, by admitting on national television that she had no idea who her husband was, that he could very well be a killer and a monster. She would not let that pound of flesh be taken – not right now, and not by Sonya Martinez.

  “No. There’s no way. Jonathan was…” – Mary paused for a moment, her throat suddenly tightening – “…is…a good man.”

  * * *

  The lights went off. The halos were gone. The angels disappeared and were replaced by mere mortal men and women. The crew started moving their gear, and the world went back to its dull colors, the facade of life. The pretty-but-not-too-pretty Sonya hugged her, but Mary could barely bring her arms around for an embrace before the reporter said a few hollow words and walked off into the darkness of the studio. Crewmen stripped Mary of the recording gear and led her out to the front offices and the glass doors that opened to the parking lot in front of the network branch office.

  Detective Rick Gerrano met her at the doors and walked her to her car.

  “How did it go?”

  “Hard.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’ll air tonight, and we’ll see what kind of response we get. This kind of publicity can bring people out of the woodwork. Get people talking. We just need to find a thread to follow.”

  “Like finding your way out of a labyrinth,” she said.

  “Kind of like that, yeah.”

  But the labyrinth was a trap; it was stalked by a monster.

  Detective Gerrano shook her hand. His hands were cold from standing outside, and his grip was viselike, practiced with condemning the guilty. “We’ll see what comes of it, and I’ll be in touch,” he said and then left.

  Mary was alone again. She could hear the sound of the highway droning in the distance, beneath the gray, wintering sky, and in that moment she felt she was stuck in some kind of eternity, condemned to this lifelessness forever.

  It was a forty-five-minute drive back to her house. She didn’t want to go there. She dreaded it, in fact. But for now there was nowhere else to be, and she was told she should stay there on the off chance that Jacob returned or a phone call was placed by a witness or the person who took him.

  The silence of being alone was awful, and she played the radio as she drove, occasional news reports buffering songs of love, life and loss that musicians tend to capture with two-line rhymes.

  She stopped at the intersection where the bus had let Jacob off. She could see her house and driveway just through the small copse of trees, which were bare and gray in the cold. She wondered if this was all just some kind of dream from which she would wake, that it was an alternate reality to which she’d been transported in that moment when she stared into the woods behind her home and saw into the eyes of a stranger. If one thing – just one second – had been different that day, her life would be different; Jacob would be home. It wasn’t fair that such horrid weight should hinge on one split second, one coincidence, one decision. That was an unfair burden of life, and it made her think that life was not what it seemed, that it was, in fact, some kind of false light, a holograph meant to tease, test and eventually destroy. But for what purpose, she did not know. This can’t be it. This can’t be reality. She wanted to tear through it as if it were a movie screen, but that was impossible. Everything was just too real – empty, hollow and real.

  She was trapped here in this world, in this ungodly version of reality, this tragedy played out on a stage she could not leave.

  She opened the door to the house, the culmination of her and Jonathan’s life together, a place they had worked and saved for to raise a family and live a quiet life tucked into an average neighborhood. The scratches were still on the door, the five-finger grooves that sliced across the barrier between the outside world and what they had created inside. She stared at them for a minute. Something had tried to get inside, to get at her and Jacob. What was it? No one had an answer.

  The silence overwhelmed her. Mary went inside, put her bag down and looked around the empty living room, the kitchen, the stairway to Jacob’s bedroom. The afternoon seemed to stretch out long and terrible before her, and she realized she had nothing to do – nothing she could do – but sit in the awful silence.

  The guilt and rage and regret built up inside – a ball in her gut that seemed to expand with every moment, with every second, in which her child was gone and her husband locked up and her life no longer her own. She didn’t know what to do, and perhaps that was the worst thing of all.

  Mary walked to the kitchen sink and peered out through the small window that looked on the sloping backyard and the trees beyond, the place where she had seen that stranger on the day Jacob disappeared.

  She stared into those dead trees with their branches intersecting at angles, forming fractal patterns, one on top of the other, mesmerizing her as they reached farther and farther into the depths, beyond what she could see with her eyes. What was out there? Beyond what anyone could see? What hid just out of sight, behind the trees and in all the unknown dark spaces?

  The woods seemed to rush up to her. The yard disappeared beneath it, until it swallowed the whole house. The neighborhood disappeared. The world grew dark, and she found herself alone in a cabin in the woods at night – the trees innumerable, the possibilities endless, the horror overwhe
lming. It was a dreamscape, as if she had suddenly plunged into a dream within a dream, or, perhaps, a nightmare. She wondered if in that moment she understood what Jonathan had seen on that trip, if the madness she saw out there had found its way inside, into their lives. She wondered if that was where Jacob was hidden, in that dark maze of forest and frozen ground and silence.

  She thought she could see, at the edge of her vision, a small figure standing among the trees. She strained her eyes to see if it was him. She heard a whisper follow through the branches, carried on the wind, like the voice of a frightened child standing over his mother’s bed in the night, whispering about monsters.

  She reached out into the abyss, and something awful reached back.

  Epilogue

  I am being watched. I think, perhaps, since the first day of my life, but certainly since we buried Thomas Terrywile in Coombs’ Gulch. And I am being watched by others. For a long time I was locked in a hospital where I was on ‘suicide watch’, and nurses, accompanied by big orderlies, would come to me with needles when I tried to tell them the truth. The injections made me dizzy and tired. I would sleep for days, drifting in and out of this world and finding myself back in the Gulch, seeing visions of Jacob trapped in the dark nothingness. In those long hours of unconsciousness, I relived my previous life, over and over again. I made different decisions; I walked various paths. But each time, I ended in the same place. Our lives are preordained nightmares. Our strings are attached to the puppeteers and cannot be cut. I would wake and try to tell them, tell them about Jacob, tell them about me, and each time it was another needle and a return to the darkness. I drifted in and out of alternate realities that all ended the same, and behind it I sensed the horrid truth.

  I was watched by them for a long time until I finally learned to shut up and keep the truth to myself so they finally let me out.

  Mary was gone by then. I tried to reach her, but she was gone from me, from everything, I suppose. I went to the house. The locks were changed, and it was empty. There was a For Sale sign in the front yard.

  The police watched me for a long time. I would spot an inconspicuously dressed man or a dark-colored sedan behind me at various intervals, keeping track of where I went and what I did. They followed me when I drove out to that place in the forest where they had followed Jacob’s scent to the very end. The design of rocks had been removed to discourage the curious public, but I found the spot and knew that I was in the right place. I could feel it. Standing there, I closed my eyes and felt close to it – to that place where my boy was trapped, to the demon-god that kept him there. I could practically see it, and in that moment I heard a distant whispering. Something in the trees urging me to action, to do something terrible.

  Do you see?

  I saw.

  The police tail didn’t last long. Jacob’s case went cold for everyone but me. I think even Mary gave up after a couple of years. I would occasionally call her, but her voice was dead and distant. There was nothing between us anymore. Perhaps Jacob was all that really held us together – our tether – and once he was gone, Mary and I were connected by nothing more than an absence. Once, I tried to tell her what I knew, but she immediately launched into histrionics. She didn’t want to hear it. It was insane, a product of a broken mind. “What were you doing out there in those mountains?” she asked once, but I did not have an answer that anyone wanted to hear or believe, so I said nothing.

  But I understood what she was asking in that question: How was I connected to Jacob’s disappearance? Did I do what everyone suspected, but could not prove? She once told a television reporter that I was a good man, that I had nothing to do with Jacob’s disappearance. She had steeled herself, set her jaw and told the world that I could never do something like that. But the answer to Mary’s question wasn’t so simple. I was responsible. Looking back over all the difficulty I put my family through leading up to that awful day, I was responsible for so much. Sometimes, I felt I was partly responsible for every damn horrible thing that happened in the world. And maybe I was. Maybe we all are. Maybe that’s why I can’t look at anyone with a straight face.

  Mary still does interviews every now and then, typically on the anniversary of Jacob’s disappearance, which has some imaginary importance media outlets can make a headline out of – two years, five years, ten years.

  A few years after I was released from the hospital, I found Rich, the old hunter I had once asked about the most dangerous animal to hunt. He lived in the same place and was very familiar with the circumstances and stories surrounding what had happened to me and Jacob. I looked ragged. I was practically homeless, sleeping in some no-name motel on my earnings as a line cook for a wedding hall, a place where young men and women start their lives together like gears being milled for work in an unknowable machine. Those days were filled with regret, the constant reminder of all I had lost. I looked on those couples and wondered what secrets they hid from each other that could eventually rise up and swallow them whole.

  Rich answered the door and looked at me like he might kill me. I told him I wanted to hear more about the polar bears, about the white tundra of the North Pole, about what made him so uneasy hunting them.

  “I didn’t hunt them,” he said, his voice insistent and animated. “I was a contractor for an oil company working in the Arctic Circle. My job was to keep the workers safe, keep the executives with their two-thousand-dollar parkas from being eaten by the wolves or the bears, or kicked to death by an angry mama moose. Even back then, white men couldn’t hunt them. The Inuits had special laws that allowed polar bear hunting in particular seasons. But I was there to defend the bigwigs and employees from threats when they had to go on expeditionary excursions. Frankly, I didn’t do much. I think they kept me around because it looked good, made a good story, made them feel like they were doing something to keep themselves safe up there. We lost more men to them getting drunk, wandering out into the tundra and freezing to death, than anything else. The six months of light and the six months of darkness threw a lot of them off, made them crazy, in a way. I was used to it. I had done military training stints up there. It’s a different kind of place. It’s like a world that functions according to a different set of rules – physics, maybe. Anyway, I didn’t have any trouble. Didn’t even get to shoot anything, just basically kept an eye on things from a distance. The animals didn’t come close, really. But there was one time.

  “We were going out to scout a new pipeline route. A real desolate area. Nothing but snow and hillocks and frozen tundra. We took a helicopter in. It was bright that day. The snow blinds you, so I had on goggles. They make everything look flat. You can’t see the contours of the land. It’s hard to distinguish what’s alive and what isn’t. I wasn’t too concerned at first because nearly everything up there is cold and dead.

  “But I could feel it almost as soon as we stepped off that helicopter. Something out there, something watching. The thing with polar bears is they rarely come across humans. They don’t know to stay away. They don’t distinguish between food sources up there. A human might as well be a seal who can’t swim, and there we were, six fat seals all lined up like a buffet.

  “You ever seen how polar bears hunt? They’re patient. They wait and stalk for hours. And you can’t see them out there in all that white. They’ll sit dead motionless watching. They’ll wait till the wind is kicking up snow like a blizzard so their movement is hidden. They’ll be staring straight at you with those triangular heads just a few yards off, and you can’t see them. But you can feel it sometimes. Maybe it’s those leftover instincts from our caveman days. Anyway, we were no sooner on the ground than I could feel it. It was just us out there. Not another human soul for hundreds of miles, but I could feel something watching us. I glassed every bit of that tundra, couldn’t see nothing. I kept the executives and engineers in a tight group and separated myself to draw whatever it was out toward me. I was carrying a .45-70. A close
-up gun. A hundred yards at best. I knew anything out there would be up close, fast and personal.

  “I was a few hundred yards from the group. I looked back and could see them in their little huddle against the wind, so many layers of clothing and gear they looked like a poor man’s astronaut, that big whirlybird sitting on the snow with its blades bending toward the ground. Then I turned back, and in a rock outcropping I could make something out – an outline of white on white with a little black triangle of a nose, still as rock, pointing right at me. I put the binoculars up and looked. I knew what I was looking for, but he was still impossible to see. I didn’t want to backtrack. I didn’t want to turn my back. They run so fast. Fast enough to run up on a seal before it slips into the sea. I just stared at him, and he stared back at me. I was pretty sure I could make out those beady little eyes.

  “I put that Remington up to my shoulder and sighted that black nose in as best I could. It was then I heard something on the wind. My name. Someone was screaming my name. I broke concentration for a second and turned to look over my left shoulder back toward the group, and it was then that I saw this massive white mass pounding across the snow toward me, flanking me. This big male was coming at me like a freight train. It was so fast. There was so much force behind it. For a moment I was completely stunned – literally immobile with fear and surprise. He was ten yards away when I got off my first shot. I didn’t have time for a second. But I was lucky. A head shot. All fifteen hundred pounds of him came sliding up to my feet.”

  “They were hunting in pairs? I didn’t think polar bears did that.”

  “They don’t. There was no other bear. I was staring at the rock outcropping, thinking I saw something that wasn’t there. I imagined it, made a bear out of some random rocks and snow, and the whole time that big bear was moving up on me from my left. It was like a trap. The glamour of the snow tricked me, lured me in with an illusion before he made his killing strike. The guys back at the helicopter saw him running me down, screamed my name. If the wind hadn’t carried their voices, I probably would’ve never heard. It was a split-second shot. Pure luck, nothing else. Their heads are small, sleek. It was an impossible shot. Frankly, to this day, I wonder if that bear actually got me and everything else is just a dying dream. You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes just as you die? Everyone assumes it’s the memories of the life you’ve lived that flashes in your mind. But what if your whole life flashes before your eyes? Not just the life we lived but the life we were going to live? Sometimes I wonder about that,” he said. “What if all this” – he gestured around to the small, dilapidated house, his random collection of belongings, the world – “is just my life flashing before my eyes while that bear is tearing me apart?”