Boy in the Box

by Marc E. Fitch

  * * *

  The following years, I wandered the deep forests, searching. I combed through hunting grounds during off season. I thought of those moments, those images of lost children captured on hunting cameras, glowing eerie and strange in the night, appearing out of nowhere in the middle of nowhere. I thought back to the visions I’d had of Thomas Terrywile, the moments he was given form and shape again to wander in the wilderness, the moments when he would see campers or a vacationing family and try to reach out to them. It was like he had no voice to speak. Or maybe it was the people who had no ears to hear or eyes to see. Maybe everyone was looking at something else.

  But I knew what I was searching for. I knew I could see them, because I knew where to look. I knew how to look, because I had been there. I had seen that evil presence. I had seen the beyond. I had glimpsed the horror underlying it all.

  I wandered the hills, the mountains, everywhere for years, and I came to understand Rich’s experience in the tundra as much as I understood my own experience in the mountains. I was being watched, followed, tricked into looking at one thing while being savaged by another. The police were long gone. They could never be bothered to follow me out so deep into the wilderness, so far away. But there were others watching me in those deep forests, when I would spend days and nights surrounded by nothing but mountains and the maze of trees.

  I would see them every once in a while, looking at me from a distance. Or their faces might appear from behind a tree. Michael, Conner and Gene waited for me out there, their faces distorted, their bodies moved by some unseen force. They were both dead and alive. Perhaps they were dead in this life but alive in another. Perhaps their corporeal forms were possessed with that cold blackness of the netherworld, forced to wander the world and do its bidding. I could feel that darkness in myself, as well. A core of cold that spread through my veins and grew like a cancer, changing me, influencing me, corrupting my thoughts. As I camped in the wilderness at night Michael, Conner and Gene would whisper to me, sitting just outside my tent, their strange voices penetrating the thin fabric and boring into my mind. Four friends brought together again. They told me what I must do. How I could win back my boy, my Jacob, and somehow make everything right again. Perhaps I had flashed forward, like Rich said. Perhaps this was all just a dying dream and I needed to wake.

  I could hear them walk through the trees around my campsite. They would move things and sometimes take them in the middle of the night. They gave offerings at times, dead animals, whose carcasses would lie at the entrance to my tent. Offerings, trades; I knew what they wanted.

  I found the perfect spot in the Appalachians, just beyond a small hunting town in Maine. It was a clearing in a sycamore forest, where the trees seemed to part in a natural circle and left the ground bare. I knew it was the right place because I saw, just for a moment, Jacob standing there in the center of it, staring at me with a quiet, pleading fear on his face, dressed in little boy clothes – the same outfit he wore when Mary sent him to school that day. He hadn’t aged a day. I looked like a crazed and ragged vagrant who’d been sleeping in the woods for weeks, but he recognized me. Then he was gone like a ghost or hallucination. I vomited right then out of shock and longing. I wished I could switch places with him. I would happily give my life for his. I walked into the center of that clearing, fell to my knees and felt his presence, as if he were standing just over my shoulder where I could not see him. I turned around and around, but he was always just out of sight.

  I snatched six-year-old Ryan Temple from the edge of a soccer field while his family watched his older brother play a heated match against a rival town. I hadn’t made much of a plan, but everything just fell into place. I knew from the whispers outside my tent that I should be there, hidden in the bushes at the far edge of the field, which fell toward a brook and a small wood, a tentacle from the large forest beyond where my stone altar waited amid the sycamores. Ryan was a good-looking boy, skinny with a mop of hair, which seems to be the style for children these days. He was dressed well and had big brown eyes that sparkled with curiosity as he wandered along the wooded edge of the sports field.

  He just disappeared from the world and into my arms. His parents were distracted. Everyone was looking away at just the perfect moment. Maybe they were watching the game. Maybe they were lost in the eyes of the strange-looking figure stalking near the parking lot on the opposite side of the field from me. Maybe they were wondering what such a horrid man was doing near their children, near a place where wholesome families gathered to reaffirm their lives were worth living, trying to create purpose in small, meaningless games. Ryan was drawn over to the far edge of the field by a moment of curiosity, sparked by something he perhaps saw or heard. I don’t know. But there he was, and I took him; no one knew better until we were far, far away.

  It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was the hardest thing I’ve done in my entire life. The burgeoning horror of my actions was second only to the moment years ago when I knew my son was lost. The boy struggled against me, squirmed and cried. I felt sorry for him, but then all I could think of was Jacob’s horror at being taken that day, of Jacob’s cold terror, trapped in the eternal darkness, a plaything for this demon-god that now awaited my offering.

  Do you see?

  Yes, I saw. I saw what needed to be done. There was little that could possibly make my life worse but maybe one thing that could make Jacob’s better – even if it meant damning myself forever.

  It was dark when I reached the clearing with my offering in tow, but the white stones I dug from the surrounding hills glowed in their occult pattern. At the edge of their soft light, I could see Conner, Michael and Gene and make out the strange symbols they had carved into the trees. They stood in a perfect triangular formation at the outer ring, their ghoulish countenances looking on. They seemed completely devoid of life, but there was some kind of eagerness emanating from their broken forms.

  The child struggled and screamed. I clamped my dirty hand over his mouth. I stepped across the threshold of the circle and brought the poor, trembling boy to the center. Conner, Michael and Gene, my oldest friends, began to give up some awful chant; their mouths did not move, but the sound came – a summoning in half-formed words that I did not understand.

  The rocks, the trees, the stars and the earth seemed to swirl around us in that moment. The glow of the stones grew more intense. The disembodied chants grew louder till they filled the air with their vibrations.

  I put the boy on his feet in front of me and stood over him, holding him in place with my hands on his shoulders.

  And I, in turn, could suddenly feel something standing over me, something familiar breathing down my neck with a sickening chuff.

  The boy cried, but I held him there, waiting to see Jacob, waiting for him to suddenly appear and come back to me, and for this poor child to be relegated to that cold, dark place. It was an even trade. Sometimes we have to do awful things. I knew in my mind this was wrong, perhaps the most wrong thing I’d ever done. But there was Jacob. There was my boy trapped in that world, tortured and alone. I made my choice long ago when we buried Thomas Terrywile in Coombs’ Gulch and kept it secret to save my own skin.

  A heavy, clawed hand clasped my shoulder. A shiver of knives traced down my spine. That terrified little boy looked up at me. His wide eyes glowed in the moonlight.

  I am not a good man.

  Acknowledgments

  I would first like to thank Don D’Auria and the whole team at Flame Tree Press for seeing the potential in this novel and for all their hard work, making it the best it could be. It was an honor to be able to work with them and I’m grateful for the opportunity.

  I wrote this novel during a very difficult time of my life and I’d like to thank the people who helped see me through those very tough times, starting with my parents, who have always supported me even if they wished I wrote in a different genre. Thank you to Laura for g
iving me a place to live and being a great friend; thank you to Stephen, who helped keep me on the right path; thank you to Carla and Kim for your friendship and support; to J.B. and Stephanie for helping me during some low times; to all my work colleagues who kept pushing me (and paying me, thank God) and to S.H. for helping me believe in myself again.

  Lastly, I want to thank my four beautiful children without whom I would surely be lost.

  About this book

  This is a FLAME TREE PRESS BOOK

  Text copyright © 2020 Marc E. Fitch

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  FLAME TREE PRESS, 6 Melbray Mews, London, SW6 3NS, UK, flametreepress.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Thanks to the Flame Tree Press team, including: Taylor Bentley, Frances Bodiam, Federica Ciaravella, Don D’Auria, Chris Herbert, Josie Karani, Molly Rosevear, Mike Spender, Cat Taylor, Maria Tissot, Nick Wells, Gillian Whitaker. The cover is created by Flame Tree Studio with thanks to Nik Keevil and Shutterstock.com.

  FLAME TREE PRESS is an imprint of Flame Tree Publishing Ltd. flametreepublishing.com. A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  HB 978-1-78758-384-9 | PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-382-5

  UK-PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-383-2 | ebook ISBN: 978-1-78758-385-6

  Created in London and New York

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