Stephen King's Box

by Claudio Hernández

  16

  ‘Mom, is it true that a school burned out?

  Leia lifted her head all of a sudden with her eyes slightly more open than usual. She was washing the dishes and the sun rays that came through the window hit her in the face.

  ‘How do you know that? She asked.

  ‘Rumor has it,’ said Steve while he watched the bottom of the glass of milk he just frank. Lately, his mom brought more money and milk was again in the pantry.

  Leia lowered her head again fixing her eyes n the dishes on the sink.

  ‘Was it true?’ insisted Steve, playing with his glass.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me mom, I’m all ears,’ said Steve quickly with sparkly eyes.

  There was a noise, a plate hitting the tap.

  ‘It was in Boad Hill. I can’t remember if it was on the primary school or the junior high. But it was tragically.

  ‘Everyone was burned alive. Everyone!’ interrupted Steve, who now was standing next to his mom.

  She scolded him.

  ‘As I was telling you, it was a tragic event. Apparently, a fire was created in one of the classes that ended with the life of all the students that were inside that classroom. The news spread like gun powder. Twenty three students died.’ She took a deep breath and continued. ‘It was in all the local papers. When it was time to identify them, it was the worst. Twenty three mother praying that body wasn’t her son’s or daughter’s. It was hard and it marked the habitants of Boad Hill and its surroundings.

  Then, Steve remembered his worst nightmare. Twenty three where there was supposed to be twenty four. One was missing. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there, thinking.

  She doesn’t exist; she’s nothing but an image, a mirror. But if everyone messed with her, everyone could see her. But it wasn’t her class that set on fire, but another one in a city called Boad Hill. This is Crystal Lake, of course. I’m confused.

  ‘Uhmm,’ he said after a long while of thinking.

  ‘That marked forever the life of the habitants of Boad Hill,’ finished his mom.

  Steve sat again in the chair next to the table where moments before he had drank a glass of milk almost without breathing. In the end, it didn’t happen in his class. Just that. It didn’t happen in his class.

  Cassandra doesn’t exist, she’s just an image.

  But now, he started to think in the hole he dug until nightfall. Its size.

  Dig guys and don’t ask any questions.

  That was Matthew’s voice, the town’s burier. A skinny guy that wore a thick beard and thin lips. His eyebrows were like two cat tails placed on two tiny, deeply sad, grey eyes. His face was an art of wrinkles forming strange forms and he wore some old jeans and a red and white squares shirt, with the sleeves folded up to the elbow.

  Dig the hole and go home. I’ll pay you tomorrow.

  17

  There was a burial. Only two people showed up, without counting the four people with shovels that were there just the enough time to do their job. There was a lot of vigilance, though. They were unknown people in the town. With sweaty shirts and caps wore backwards. They must have been a group of men willing to earn a couple of bucks and nothing more. No connection between them and probably, they didn’t know what was going on in there.

  The man with a black trench coat had a cane. In mid-summer, wearing a trench coat was nuts. He must be sweating like crazy. He also was wearing a black hat and he didn’t cleaned the sweat of his forehead, not once. Actually, he wasn’t even sweating. Unlike the men around him, that showed wet armpits down to their waists and wet chests.

  An enormous coffin was loaded down the hole, attached by thick ropes. After this, dirt was thrown on top of the box. There wasn’t a mass, or crucifixes. There weren’t either women with black veils crying. Just the man in the trench coat and a strong man looking around frequently. This man wore a shit, a brown shirt. Nothing strange. And he wasn’t sweating either under the relentless sunrays of that summer afternoon.

  The burier wasn’t around either, only the four men mentioned before. They lowered the coffin, filled the hole with dirt and then left, like scared crows. That was the deal. No words, no looks.

  And that night, Steve had another nightmare.

  18

  He dreamt of something that was especially predictable for him. He had read a story about some vampires in a small town in Maine and its brain will do the rest. He dreamt of a horrible shadow with wings and in the end of these wings, there were some claws like spatulas. A thick fog climbed up his window and behind it, a pair of yellow eyes shone outside Steve’s room, which was on the first floor. Whatever that creature was, it was floating in the air. And then, the noise on the crystal. A scratch that didn’t leave a mark on the crystal but did make a special chirp. After that, he had goose bumps all over his body.

  There was something out there, among the fog. Something he didn’t know. And the large shadow reflected on the wall. Then Steve woke up breathing heavily and, once more, he felt his heart racing like a horse.

  ‘It’s a dream,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Like the others. Those damn stories of the box...’

  And he remained awake for the rest of the night.

  19

  Two things happened that summer of 1960. One, they announced on the radio that a fourteen year old boy had been missing in the woods and that probably he would already be dead by now (a group of four boys was searching for him in the woods). And two, at least two girls went missing in Crystal Lake. And all of this happened two weeks after that large coffin had been buried. And Steve checked that the dirt covering the coffin hadn’t been moved. It was intact. Dry as the husk and burning like fire, at about noon, when the sun rays were more relentless. Steve had a lot of imagination.

  20

  Ben visited him again.

  ‘Steve, time’s getting closer,’ he said with a broken voice. He didn’t have any bowels left, he had a hug hole where there were supposed to be his bowels. There were maggots, thousands of them, moving around his stomach. His chest showed part of his ribs and his jaw was visible. A long row of yellow teeth moved up and down when he spoke. He barely had a tongue but he kept his windpipe, which was also visible. That’s why his voice sounded broken. His hair and nails had grown long.

  Steve observed him, without moving. He didn’t say anything, he just looked at him.

  ‘He is here and he’s coming for the girls,’ said Ben’s broken voice.

  ‘Who?’ asked Steve, sitting on his bed. Ben was at the end of the bed.

  ‘He who needs blood.’

  ‘Buah! I read it in one of the stories of the box. It’s about a vampire that shocks the town of Boad Hill. But in the story, he doesn’t care about sucking everybody’s blood. But all of this is imagination of a certain D.E.K., who I don’t know who he is and I don’t even care anymore.

  There was a short silence.

  ‘You are destined to live all of this, brother,’ added what was left of Ben.

  ‘I’m destined to drive myself crazy if I read too many stories like those. They only provoke nightmares and good stories, of course.’ Steve smiled a little bit.

  ‘And you’ll see more things.’

  ‘Like what? Sure, and I’ll go nuts’

  ‘It’s your destiny. It’s your life.’

  ‘I just want to be a good writer. That’s enough for me.’

  ‘Yes. But first wait and you’ll see.’

  ‘I’ll wait...’ he scratched his chin.

  The conversation ended and Ben went through the door once more, turning his back to Steve. Steve shrugged. And he thought he was turning crazy. He talked to his late brother, had recurrent nightmares that really happened in some way and he wrote terror stories inspired in those events. And he read a lot. There were many stories in the box he found in the basement, all of them were hard to believe, but he did. Or could it be that Ben’s death left him reckless? Maybe he was somewhere else already, under the effects
of a large quantity of sedatives and it was all part of a treatment. He saw himself lying on a bed with his eyes purple and wide open, without sleeping. With delirious ideas and with a large part of madness instead of sanity.

  Steve could be in any state. But he didn’t know that for certainty. The madness. The obsession. The trauma. Everything. But he was at home and he was sane.

  On the next two weeks, three more girls of ages between eleven and thirteen went missing. Search groups looked for them in vain. The entire town was upset. And the man with the long black trench coat hasn’t been seen since the burial in the cemetery or in anywhere else around town. Except for the other man, who once stared at Steve when he was crossing the street and smiled at him with a sense of craziness in his eyes. But after that, Steve didn’t see him again.

  Summer and fall went by and those five little girls never appeared again.

  Only the stories and the dreams remained.

  And the nightmares. And Ben.

  21

  Winter came again and Cassandra didn’t appear in Steve’s life ever again. Was she ever really there? Had she moved out of her house and out of town? He would never know that. He wrote a story that he sent to three terror specialized magazines. This time, it was about an alcoholic family guy which went nuts trying to write a book about ghosts. The same ghosts he saw in the hallways of the hotel in which he worked and was hosted with his wife and three kids. He wanted to kill them all, but didn’t manage to do it. Steve changed the version of the story many times. In some of them, the Father does kill every member of the family with an axe. In another version, the man had a sexual relationship with a dead woman who showed him her true face after the sex. She had bruised skin, puffy lips and maggots on her neck and eyes.

  The three versions were rejected and the rejection letters were stored in the manuscript’s box. That box in the basement. But before he could think of another story to write, he had nightmares again. Cruel nightmares in a hotel room and a woman.

  And a boy.

  22

  The boy was in front of the room door number 13, with his red eyes wide open. He had blonde hair; he was skinny and wore a red jersey with blue pants. Inside of the hotel, the heating boiler was working to its fullest and the hallways were extremely long. Heat waves came out of the water radiators that were in every corner. The boy stretched his right arm with a shaky tic in his tiny hand. He must be seven or eight years old. He was standing and barely holding himself due to the anxiety created by the situation. He had heard somewhere, before he came to the hotel with dad, mom and his two sisters, that someone had died recently in that room and that she wasn’t found until two weeks later, all rotten and puffy because of the gases. It was a woman. His thin finger touched the door knob. Nothing happened. Under his feet, there was the endless carpet that covered the entire hallway.

  Open the door, kid, and you’ll see what’s good, said a voice hidden by the carpet lined walls. Carpet on the walls? Yes.

  The boy looked away for a moment. He looked on both sides of the hallway. There was nothing, except for a long, sleepy silence. He looked the door knob again. He squeezed it with his thin fingers. He turned the door knob to the right and the door opened like if it had springs instead of hinges. Inside, he saw his father with his body curved to his front and contracting his ass. Actually, he was on top of a body and he moved his waist constantly, in and out. The boy could see what was beneath his father, on the bed, covered with a red bedspread. He could listen the wailing his father made every time he contracted his hips and ass. The boy took a few steps. His father, the vigilant of the hotel, didn’t notice his presence and kept his sight fixed in her eyes. Now that the boy could see her, he took three steps back.

  ‘Uhmm. What a beauty, what a pleasure!’ wailed his father.

  The boy saw her as she was. Every little detail. She wasn’t a sensual woman, nor pretty or exuberant. Everything that his dad asked of his mother, who was ugly, skinny and cold in bed. The woman on the bed, the one that was beneath his father’s body (whose pants were lowered to his ankles) was naked, but she was purple. She was puffy and underneath her skin you could see some movements like if something was moving underneath her. His father, with an erection never seen before on him, was making love to an amorphous body with the whitest eyes of the world looking extremely big in the eye sockets without eyelids. Her teeth were yellow and grey, showing some maggots. And the, he kissed her. His dad took out his pink tongue to lick the puffy and purple tongue of hers. Of a dead woman! And her tits, they hanged like dumps on every side of her chest with black stretch marks and more maggots falling directly to the floor.

  And all of a sudden, Steve woke up from the nightmare.

  ‘One more time’, he whispered and he spent the rest of the night trying to make a story about the boy and the dead woman fucking his father.

  23

  Leia was always busy in the mornings in the kitchen. She was either washing the dishes or preparing the breakfast. Now Steve could eat a poached egg because his mom now had a job in a hostel and more money came to the house. His aunt, on one side of the table, kept showing up like a hooray waiting her turn to squawk.

  Then Steve had an experience.

  Damn boy. Damn sister. I would give you bread crumbs...

  He listened to it perfectly, but his aunt didn’t move her lips. He mouth was closed tightly forming wrinkles on the sides. But he looked at her. He had “pushed” a little. A tingling in his forehead and he had listened to her clearly. And this wasn’t the only time he had experienced that phenomenon. Sometimes, he knew what others were thinking.

  While his mom was about to throw a new egg in the pan to cook it, Steve tried to “push” again, but now he didn’t listened anything in his head, and a memory came to his head about the vividly scene of his nightmare, and a little laughter came out of his mouth. His aunt raised an eyebrow.

  And nothing different happened again that morning. He had enough by now. He had enough.

  24

  In the local newspaper appeared strange news about a man that, after watching a woman kill herself in a hotel room, had decided to end with his family with an axe in his hand. The news was on the front page of the papers and it was a copy of a regional newspaper, which was also a copy of an international paper. It happened in Colorado.

  Steve frowned while holding the paper tightly until he wrinkled it on the corners. It was in the front page. He started reading it for himself.

  ‘It was them. They made me do it’ he sucked on his snot and swallows them. He had a cold.

  The man had killed his wife first with a huge axe, with a single precise cut on the neck. Then, he went for the girls, which were found in a hotel room. The two of them were together and holding hands. The police doesn’t know if the died together while holding hands or if the father placed them like this after killing them. The crime scenes were places with blood everywhere. Although it was obvious what had happened, and after reading the suicide note the father left, the forensics had to realize autopsies to determine the cause of death. The man’s autopsy, the hotel’s vigilant, revealed that he was drunk when he executed the murders. They found a high concentration of alcohol in his blood. The man died of a shot in his head, which was almost nothing left of it according to the Sheriff’s assistant’s declarations. The gun, unloaded, was on the floor, but they could tell that it was placed between the floor and the murderer’s mouth. So the idea of another person being in the rooms of the horrible crimes was discarded. In the letter the man had written, it said that it was mostly their fault that he offered his apologies but he had to kill them. He addressed mostly to his wife, accusing her of being ice cold on the bed. Apparently, always based on the note, the murderer had an affair with a beautiful woman on the same hotel. It didn’t say anything else. He didn’t write anything else but “lover” on the letter. Something bothered the Sheriff, because something didn’t fit, according to the following words in the letter. “The burial will b
e tomorrow”...

  And Steve let go of the paper in the air. This fell to the floor showing a dark picture of the hotel’s front.

  ‘What a crappy news!’ he said while sucking his not again. ‘There’s no murderer’s name, nor hotel’s name, nor the room number. Nothing!’

  Nothing, except the mention that it was a hotel in Colorado.

  25

  And the flu came. This year, stronger than ever. Everyone at home had the flu, recovering with hot soups. Steve had written the story about the woman in the room and the hotel’s vigilant. He made his own version, of course. The story ended up in the box he found in the basement, for now, before a second look. The basement was the place where Ben and himself spent time playing until they were exhausted, until the laughed their asses off, lying on the floor, under the sunrays, the rain, or the snow.

  Now, he knew two things. Ben was dead and he could listen to other people without them moving their lips.

  And the recurrent nightmares.

  They were all some kind of premonition.

  Now, everything was clear. He wasn’t crazy. He coughed and raised a fist to his mouth. He was sitting on his bed, with almost forty of fever, sweating heavily and hallucinating. Thinking in everything that had happened last year. Thinking of Ben again. And no. Things don’t end here. There were still more. Without going that far, that night he had another nightmare.

  26

  The world was terrified. The virus was mortal. The government of the United States of America had a secret plan to manufacture a new bacteriological weapon. And the simple flu virus escaped. But it wasn’t that simple because it killed in less than forty eight hours. They called it the superflu. And the world became infected by it and millions of people died in a try to live desperately. Death always wins.

  27

  He dreamed of the flu, the super flu, and the millions that had been infected and died. From Colorado to New York, up to Maine. From U.S.A. to Africa, making its way to Asia and ending up in Europe. More than a dream, it was a nightmare.