The Box

Light rain pattered down on the sidewalk. A steady downpour had begun, decorating the sidewalk with a few raindrops here and there. Pencils scratched on paper. The classroom was silent, save for some sighs or sniffles. Someone in the back of the room flipped their paper loudly. Finally, the long awaited bell clanged repetitiously through the air and all at once an inflow of students streamed out of every classroom and out the door of the school building.

Three friends Lela, Rain, and Kenzie hurried down the streets. Lela ran ahead, stopping to beckon her friends onward. “Let’s take the shortcut!” she called out. They all knew about the shortcut, having passed through it several times before. It wasn’t even a shortcut, rather a scenic trail surrounded by trees, shrubbery, and the occasional onset of light mist. There was just something more fun about “adventuring” through the trails until sunset and having a secret spot all to themselves.

The trio ran down a side path that cut into the tree line. They entered a path surrounded by clusters of trees, dark green and glowing in the afternoon sun. Stuffy warm air from the sappy wood of the trees filled Lela’s lungs. She took a deep savoring breath.

“Freedom at last!”

“Can we go to yours?” Kenzie asked Lela. “Your house always has the best snacks!”

The girl in question turned abruptly to face her friends. “Speaking of! My brother just got this new game last week! We should totally try it!”

With a new goal in mind the trio continued at a faster pace, still stopping occasionally to pester each other with ridiculous questions and tease each other about something that happened at least several years ago.

Their pace broke again not long afterward. “It’s so hot!” complained Kenzie. She fanned her face with her hand, a halfhearted attempt to cool herself off. “I’m sweating waterfalls!”

Rain said matter of factly, “Then walk faster.”

“We’re almost there!” Lela encouraged me. “Just a few more blocks.” At that moment she tripped on an uneven patch in the ground and face planted in the dirt. “Ugh….” Recovering from the brief surprise she blinked once and noticed something shiny in the ground in front of her.

“Are you alright?” Kenzie came running up, followed closely by Rain who stood a little bit back.

Lela ignored the question. She shifted aside some dirt with her hands. “Guys! Look at this.”

Kneeling around the patch in the ground the two watched curiously as Lela finished uncovering the strange object. It turned out to be a small rectangular box hardly any bigger than a first grader’s lunchbox. Little wooden patterns were etched into the wood. They crisscrossed over one another, creating a border around the edges of the box. For a moment all three friends only stared at the box in silent awe. For having been out here for who knows how long, it was in awfully good condition. Kenzie broke the silence. “What’s in it?” Lela shrugged. Rain reached towards the box to open it.

Then Kenzie’s phone rang with a text message. She read it and sighed. “My mom wants me to come home now, can you wait to open the box until we are all together again?”

“We can all meet up tomorrow for the big reveal,” Rain chuckled. “That is, if you can wait!”

“Bye!” said Lela. Rain waved as Kenzie walked off in the direction of her house. Rain split off not long later to head on home.

The first thing Lela did when she got home was look at the box again. The more she looked at the carvings, the more she noticed the little details: the way the carvings all ended abruptly at one point near the back of the box, the way little words seemed to be carved into the box. She couldn’t read them. They were too small and the lighting cast deep shadows over them. Still, it piqued her curiosity.

Kenzie and Rain visited later in the afternoon the next day. “Did you open it?” Kenzie asked eagerly. She strode over to the box on Lela’s shelf and peered at it.

“No,” said Lela. She thought her friends might’ve wanted to see what was in it too. So, she decided to be patient.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” asked Kenzie. Without pausing for a response, she lifted the lid and peered into the box. “It’s….pictures.”

“What kind of pictures?” pressed Lela. She leaned in to get a view of the box too. There were two little square photos in crisp monochrome. A young woman stood in front of a tree’s trunk while she maintained a toothy smile. In another photo, she stood in front of a house with rose bushes lining the brick wall. In both, she sported an uncomfortable looking wool sweater and bell bottom jeans.

“Wait!” Kenzie pointed to the second photo. “Lela! That’s your house! Who’s this in the photo?”

Rain took the photo, examined it then confirmed. “Yep.”

Feeling defensive for whatever reason Lela retorted, “How can you even be sure it’s my house? There’s dozens in the neighborhood that look exactly like this. Plus our house doesn’t have rose bushes.”

Rain pointed at a spot in the window in the photo. “Only yours has that huge rainbow reflecting crystal.”

What a small detail to notice, but Lela didn’t feel like arguing. The crystal did look awfully like the one her grandmother liked to keep. As if it were something more than coincidence, her grandmother passed the door at that exact moment. She peeked her head in, squinting through her glasses at the trio. “What are you kids doing?”

“Taking a blast to the past,” Rain explained helpfully.

“We found this box in the woods,” Lela filled in. “It had these pictures in it….Did you know the person in this photo?”

Her grandmother crossed the room and examined the box and pictures more closely. She gave one of her famous untrustworthy closed-eye smiles. “Never met her in my life.” As she turned to leave she said cryptically, “While I do hope you kids have fun, do be careful. Sometimes digging up things from the past can be more harmful than not.” Then she was gone.

“That was awfully vague,” Kenzie stated.

Lela shrugged and picked up a silver ring with a semi pinkish hue. In the sun it seemed to release a gentle glow. She slipped it on her finger. Rain picked up a little stack of letters. They were folded up into neat little squares. Altogether, there were probably less than five. The letters were handed to Kenzie next. She read them aloud.

“Dearest Kaera….I’m doing very well, thank you for writing. Michigan is cold in the winters. You wouldn’t like it here. We are unalike in that I enjoy the mundanity of things. You’ve always been far more adventurous than I. Quite recently, I saved up enough to get this nice little house. The yard offers a great view to watch the sunrise. Tomorrow I’ll be planting some rose bushes along the walls. While I could go on and on about the joys of my new life, I am far more interested in hearing about your latest adventure. Please tell me you did not actually go searching for The Great Fire Breathing Centipede. You’ve heard the legends, you fool! Please do write back, but do not expect a quick response. The neighbors are getting suspicious about the whole ordeal, mysteriously disappearing mailboxes, and whatnot. I can’t keep them off my trail forever. Sincerely, your very concerned friend Magdalene.”

Lela was about to take the ring off her finger to return the box’s contents when something caught her eye. The ring began to glow, its light pulsating. It grew brighter and brighter, and hotter and hotter. Alarmed, Lela took it off rapidly. It fell to the ground. For stunned moments she only stared at it. No one dared move.

Kenzie was the one who spoke the question that hung restlessly in the air. “....Dude, what was that?”

Lela gingerly placed the ring back in the box. “Let’s try that video game my brother has, yeah?” She didn’t dare leave the box open as everyone filed out of the room.

From then on, Kenzie, Rain, and Lela noncommittally dedicated the summer months to learning more about the box and its owner. They read the letters written by the elusive Magdalene and tried to piece together whatever they could.

“Kaera, I’m glad to hear your adventures are going well. Please take more caution now that I’m no longer there to keep you out of trouble….”

“Kaera, congratulations on your latest promotion. As for me, the next door neighbor has discovered that magical secret of mine….”

“Kaera, please stop writing to me. Things have gotten out of hand over here….”

And then the letters simply ended. There was no resolution. There was no context. It was an unfinished story that Lela found herself wanting to get to the bottom of.

The letters were dated. That was one clue. The first one began in 1947. The final one dated back to 1950. Lela resolved to ask her grandmother. The old woman had been around for years and she always seemed to know what went on in town, spouting the juiciest gossip like a burst sprinkler. Even if she had said she didn’t personally know the woman in the photograph, surely she had connections. Maybe she had a friend who knew a friend. When Lela asked her a few days later, she remained adamant that she knew nothing about the box. Her reasoning ranged from there being no previous owner of the house Lela’s family lived in, to it could just be a box someone abandoned for reasons unknown. Her point remained that Lela and her friends should drop the subject. “Perhaps the box was left there because someone didn’t want the mystery to be solved. Best respect their wishes,” she’d stated simply.

Thus, the trio were left to their own devices. Kenzie took it upon herself to ask around town. Surely someone would know. Rain returned to where they found the box to see if there was any more evidence to be found. All the while, they were utterly confused by the strange happenings surrounding the box.

At night it would glow eerily and release intermittent hums. Sometimes it fell off the shelf unexplainably. One day Lela looked out the window and there was a misty apparition of the woman from the photo now standing in the driveway. She stared up at the window where Lela had frozen, watching, waiting. Quickly, she drew her curtains shut. She went to the living room and peered out the window. She opened her mouth to call for her grandma, but the apparition was gone, the mist thicker now. Happenings like this continued. Lela didn’t think to share about the apparition with anyone, for whenever she opened her mouth to mention it, the phantom vanished in a blink.

Rain was the next to notice the spooky ghost lady, mentioning it one day while they walked through town one afternoon rolling hard candies across their tongues. Kenzie was a nonbeliever until she was texting them at three in the morning about the fright she’d had when she saw the ghostly face in the hallway mirror on a trip to get some water.

A month into summer break, the most Lela and her friends had learned was that there were no known official records of a Magdalene having ever lived in the neighborhood. All the while, the strange occurrences surrounding the box continued. It was found in places no one recalled moving it to, it continued its humming at odd hours of the night, growing louder and louder until it would stop altogether and resume at a later point. No one else seemed to notice a thing was off, not even Lela’s grandmother who usually had a sixth sense when it came to things being wrong or out of the ordinary.

Things finally bubbled over the top nearing the end of summer. Everything blew up so quickly, that Lela was almost ready to mark it down as a bad dream. What had started as a few mysterious happenings with the box slowly grew and ultimately culminated into one large confrontation with the mysterious apparition. Rain had always been the quietest out of the friend group, more aloof too. No one noticed when a trio suddenly became two. Not for a while at least.

Lela’s grandmother walked by one day with a bingo sheet in hand and asked, “Where’s that other friend of yours? The quiet one who gets spooked easily.” When Lela shrugged and Kenzie looked just as clueless, she added with a forlorn shake of her head, “That’s what happens when you get too carried away with unboxing mysteries.” She gave a pointed look at the carved box and continued down the hall. Rain persisted to be M.I.A., and the days slowly bled into August. The weather remained uncharacteristically gloomy and grey.

At some point, Lela received a text from Rain. It explained everything. About where her friend had been, about the box, but nothing about how Rain had obtained the information. The owner had been Magdalene Wallace. She resided in the area for a brief time between 1940 and 1950. She worked as a librarian and kept to herself a lot. Everyone who knew her had some odd story that revolved around her. Then, suddenly, in 1951, she disappeared from the face of the Earth. Rain claimed that Magdalene had left a curse behind. Her ghost could be found lurking the streets now if the light reflected in your eyes the right way. It was a long message and Lela was lost in some parts. Nonetheless, it was the first she’d heard from Rain in weeks and she wasn’t just going to let the opportunity slip by. They arranged to meet by the scenic trail so Rain could explain in full.

. . .

Rain was waiting by the scenic trail for Lela to arrive when the apparition appeared. Its appearances were so frequent now that the specter showing up every day was always an expected occurrence. This time, something was different. The form was less solid, and less bright. It flickered in and out of sight for mere moments before its transformation began. A once harmless specter now took on a more menacing role.

Rain regretted it. Really, truly regretted it. It all must’ve started on that rainy summer’s day when they’d cut through the forest trail and found the box. Who knew something so ordinary as that would cause so much trouble. The world was blurry from tears or the rain, maybe a mix of both as Rain tried to control the rapid breathing induced from fear and running and hiding.

The noise from the trees began again, growing ever closer. The terrible gro-oa-oaan gurgling from its throat like the boiling of a pot of water. Something glinted from the bottom of the old wooden box held tightly to Rain’s chest. The lid had fallen off on the run long ago. That strange ring seemed to glow despite the overcast weather. It was a desperate last resort, but there were hardly any options left–nowhere else to run, nowhere to hide either. Rain threw the ring at the rapidly approaching formless creature. Just like it’d burnt Lela that first time, the creature retracted for a moment upon the ring’s impact. Rain was not one to linger near danger and took the second’s opportunity to slip away.

. . .

Lela found Rain running from the tree line just as she arrived. She grabbed her friend by the shoulders. “What happened?”

Rain barely had enough time to catch some air before spewing out a blubbering mess. “There-There’s a creature! I don’t know what it is! It’s the phantom. It’s–”

Rain needn’t have struggled to describe it. Lela saw it emerging slowly from the tree line and she blanched. Just what was it? That really was the least of her worries right now as the unknown thing undulated ever closer. Lela released a laugh that shook with hysteria. Her eyes must’ve been playing tricks on her. “What is that?” With not many places left to run, they sprinted to Kenzie’s house. The weather was worse now. Lightning clapped in the sky.

Kenzie, reasonably, after looking out her window and seeing an inhuman creature crawling down the streets like it’d just crawled out of a horror movie was hesitant to let her friends in at first. Math turns out to be very helpful when needing to calculate whether or not your friends will make it to the door before the scary monster does. Still, everyone made it inside unharmed.

While Rain recounted what was happening, no one dared move. Lela never took her eyes off the creature as she looked out the window. It paced back and forth, sometimes coming so close to the window that she could see the minuscule details of how it formed and lost shape just as quickly, an endless cycle. Rain finally explained that it must be the box. “This never happened before we found the box. It’s the only explanation.”

They had no more time to discuss what it was or what to do. It's a gelatinous mossy substance pooled under the doorway, seeping in closer and closer. They took cautious steps back on their toes, as if the slightest noise would alert it. Then, Rain’s back hit a wall and a hitched breath could be heard. Lela stopped when she crashed into Rain and Kenzie stopped when she crashed into Lela. Rain began shuffling through the box again. If that ring had worked last time maybe a picture or a letter would work just as well? It seemed not. The creature simply absorbed it into its existence. Finally, it caught on Kenzie’s foot.

She let out a slow exhale of someone too terrified to scream and too accepting of their fate. Lela tried to stomp on it, but its grasp only shifted to her, now manifesting a strong tug on both girls. It climbed, spiraling upwards into a horrifying unshapely tall thing that towered over them. If there was any hope before, that nanoscopic chance of escaping was gone now. Kenzie and Lela were rooted in place, unable to move from the tar like substance. Kenzie shouted her last words of encouragement as she fully vanished. “You got this, Rain!”

Lela’s mind was working overtime as she tried to figure out how to fix this. She needed to fix this. Oh, how she wished she could fix this terrible, horrible mess. A dreadful cold feeling crawled up her, starting at her toes and rushing up her spine and neck. It wouldn’t be long before she was gone too. Then, all at once, something clicked. A light bulb went off in her head.

She briefly recalled one of her grandmother's outlandish stories. “There once was a witch who lived on Crimson Street,” she’d said. It was back when Lela still believed in the magic of fairy dust and life as a princess. She could hardly recall the details of her grandmother’s story now, but she remembered giggling with her brother and asking what was her name? “Maggie,” her grandmother said, sounding quite sure of herself. “Maggie the magenta witch who wore an itchy magenta sweater and baked half burnt cherry pies and loved roses and cardinals and grew the best strawberries in her garden during the summer.” Her grandmother had told her with a secretive smile and a wink, “She left on an adventure one day, missing her home, the place she was born…” her grandmother had trailed off with eyes glassed over. It took some prodding to get her to finish her story but she said, “She used to wear a little pink ring to match her magenta sweater. If you were to find her ring, I’m sure if you find her ring and wish upon it you might just have a miracle yet. She’s old, but her magic’s not all spent yet.”

So as Lela went under she called out with her last bit of air, “The ring! You need to make a wish! Hurry, Rain!”

Said friend gaped in horror as not one, but two friends disappeared in a matter of seconds. Fingernails dug into the hollow wood of the box until they hurt. Their sacrifices would not be in vain, so Rain took the moment of pause to dart out the door and again into the stormy afternoon. It took some scavenging. Some very desperate, hurried scavenging in the mud. Rain’s hands were coated in dirt. The soggy earth slipped away easily. But at last the ring was found, glinting unusually brightly around the same spot they’d all found the box originally. It was naive hopeful thinking, but it was maybe the only chance left. One wish. A single moment to make things right. Rain’s fist closed tight around the ring so as not to lose it. I wish…

. . .

Light rain pattered down on the sidewalk. A steady downpour had begun, decorating the sidewalk with a few raindrops here and there. Pencils scratched on paper. The classroom was silent, save for some coughs and sighs here and there. Someone in the back of the room flipped their paper loudly. Finally, the long awaited bell clanged repetitiously through the air and all at once an inflow of students streamed out of every classroom and out the door of the school building.

Lela walked back home, bumping shoulders with Rain and Kenzie. “Who’s up for trying that new video game my brother got?” They raced on to her house. Lela’s grandmother greeted them briefly, asking if they wanted to snack on some fresh strawberries from her garden, before she went to the kitchen to bake one of her infamous cherry pies. Despite the muggy weather, she wore a woolen magenta sweater.