When I tried to push the lid close again, something seemed to push back, an invisible force refusing to let me close the lid.
I pushed harder, and this time, the lid slammed close.
What the heck?
Part of me wondered if it was just my imagination playing tricks on me, but the other part knew it was more to it than that. When I had tried to close that lid, a force had fought back.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk.”
I yelped and dropped the box on my bed, while my heart leapt in my chest. “What the hell?”
Three feet away from my bed, on top of my desk, sat a person.
A person who certainly hadn’t been there seconds ago, and who in fact shouldn’t be here at all.
“Wh—” I struggled to find the words. “What… Who…?”
“Rhyker is the name,” the strange man introduced himself. I couldn’t believe someone had randomly appeared in my bedroom. This situation was simply impossible. My room was on the second floor, if he had climbed in while I was checking out that box, I would’ve noticed. Besides, he couldn’t have opened the window from the outside.
How had he managed to enter my room?
“How… how did you get here?” My throat was as dry as the Sahara.
“Never mind that.” Rhyker waved my concerns away. “That question doesn’t matter. It’s not important how I got here, it’s important why I got here.” He pointed at the black box. “You opened it.”
I swallowed hard. “Yes.”
Despite Rhyker’s appearance scaring me half to death, he didn’t look threatening. If anything, he looked handsome, in a mischievous kind of way: black, unkempt hair, a piercing in his left ear, strong jaw, five o’clock shadow. If I had met him anywhere but here, I would probably be drawn to him, or at least offer him a second glance. But the most handsome specimen on earth could be sitting on my desk right now, I would still not get over how terrified I was.
My mind raced trying to make sense of how he had just popped up out of nowhere, like a clown in one of those wind-up boxes that always startled me when I was a kid.
“Although the box clearly stated ‘do not open’.” Rhyker chuckled. “How long did you have it before you decided to pry open the lid? Less than a day?”
Words refused to form, and all I could do was stare at him, flabbergasted, barely registering what he was talking about.
“Humans and their curiosity. The downfall of just about everything.” Rhyker got up from the desk, and I shuffled backward on my bed, my back pressing against the headboard.
Maybe I fell asleep. That sounded like a logical explanation; Mom and Dad hiding things from me got me upset and now I was having a nightmare.
I pinched my arm, but nothing happened.
I didn’t wake up.
“Do you have any idea of what you just did?” Rhyker leaned toward me, his hands on his side, like a teacher scolding a pupil, except this felt a million times worse.
“N—no,” I stammered.
“You ever heard of the myth of…” Rhyker glanced at the box still resting on my bed. “Pandora?”
I frowned. “Is that about the woman with the bo.. the box…” The words died in my throat.
“Yes, that’s the one.” Rhyker pointed at me playfully, and then grabbed the box from my bed, holding it up. “Once upon a time, thousands of years ago, a woman named Pandora was entrusted with a box. Not just any box, mind you, a box given to her by the gods themselves.”
He balanced the box on his hand, turning it so that the writing ‘do not open’ was pointed directly at me. “The gods gave her one task, and one task only. Do not, under any circumstances, open the box.”
Rhyker shrugged. “The gods had forgotten one very important thing. Pandora was human, and humans are nothing if not curious. Many years passed by where Pandora stayed true to her promise, each day seeing that box but not opening it, until one day, curiosity got the better of her.” He took a deep breath. “She opened the box, and unleashed evil onto this world.”
My eyes grew wide as I stared at the box. No. What he was implying couldn’t be true. Some stupid box hidden in a crumbling down mansion in the forest could not possibly be the legendary box of Pandora.
Besides, that was just a myth, a bedtime story told by the ancient Greeks to their children to keep them from being too curious.
“What most people don’t know,” Rhyker said while he took the liberty to sit down on my bed, “is that the story doesn’t end there.”
I pulled my knees up to my chest, trying to stay as far away from him as possible. I wanted to rush out of this room, but I doubted my legs, having turned to Jell-O, had the strength to carry me. Besides, I was also intrigued by his story, by who he was, how he had gotten here.
I should be freaking out. I should scream.
For all I knew, he was a serial killer who had snuck into my bedroom with the intention to slice my throat, and then saw me staring at that box and now decided to spin it into a story. But in the pit of my stomach, I felt that he was more than that.
More than… more than human.
“Having unleashed evil upon the world, Pandora swore to the gods that she would hunt down the monsters she had let free, one by one, and return them to this box. The gods, after long deliberation, decided to give Pandora a second chance.” Rhyker put the box back down. “The gods granted Pandora powers no other mortal has, powers that would help her track down the monsters. Once she hunted them down, Pandora could twist the monsters until only their essence remained, and this essence she entered into the box through the keyhole,
