Boy in the Box

tender and strong beneath the silk of her black dress, caressed her thighs and ran his hand up into the warmth of her body. She stifled a laugh; he fumbled with his belt and pants. They fell into the grass beside a bush, and she whispered to him in the darkness, “Take me now and forever.” It was a marriage proposal of sorts – not official, but enough. He disappeared into her in that moment, and all was lost inside. It was a happy moment, one unburdened by the coming future in which everything would be stripped away. She whispered in his ear throughout the entirety of their lovemaking. She told him things. She said she wanted all of him and he promised. Those whispers followed him as he made the long hike to the crest of the meadow.

He had broken that vow. He had held something back – something dark and dangerous and awful. The lies, the guilt, the remorse ate through what they once had and poisoned the blood, darkened their home, haunted their lives like a specter.

When they finally married after the incident in Coombs’ Gulch, he took her not as his wife, but as his victim.

The anguish inside him rose up out of the ground, from rock formed at the beginning of time, when the Earth was young and without love or hate or thought, when it was without time or consequence, when it was merely a tiny stone in a sea of emptiness.

More thoughts and memories came to him – the slow creep of ruin throughout the years. Conversations in hushed tones around their lonely kitchen table when there was no reason to whisper other than to gently conceal the truth from themselves: “What is going on with you?” “I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me.” “You’re so far away.” “I think there’s something wrong.”

The tender, foreboding moments that marked his life as a father and husband.

Deep in the night he woke to the sound of Jacob’s tiny voice, his tongue mispronouncing words in a hurried and hushed tone: “Daddy, I’m scared.” And Jonathan opened his eyes and slowly took in the shape of his head, so perfectly formed and whole, lacking the star-shaped hole in the left eye that haunted Jonathan’s dreams. Jacob’s face was so close to his they nearly touched, and his eyes seemed to shine in the dark of the room.

“What are you scared of?”

The single word uttered by a boy summed up all the horrors of the world: “Monsters.”

And now, walking through the meadow, nearly reaching the crest of the hill, Jonathan shared that fear. Before, he feared the guilt, the prospect of being caught, shamed, convicted, banished to prison, of being alone. Now he feared something more – the monsters that lurk in the spaces between, in unseen dimensions and in his own soul. He was the monster, more than anything else. Jacob had been right to fear – the monster slept in his home.

Jonathan’s pace slowed as he neared the horizon, where the meadow rolled over and began its descent into Coombs’ Gulch. He turned and looked back toward the lake, but couldn’t see it anymore. He looked to the mountain to his right and wondered where Michael might be – if he, too, was chasing a monster that was more a part of himself than anything else. He listened and tried to hear the reeds in the wind, hoping for an answer, or a glimmer of hope, but all that came to him were memories of his past that, pieced together, now seemed to form a tragic and predestined downward spiral.

He reached the top exhausted, sapped of will. It seemed as good a place as any to die. Everything felt wrong, but he wanted to hear their voices. He breathed hard the cold air. Jonathan dug through his pack and found his cell phone to see if it would pick up a signal. He held it aloft in the air until a lifeline appeared and immediately dialed Mary’s number.

The phone began to vibrate and ding with incoming messages, voice mails and missed calls. Over and over it shook and rang and dinged – civilization surging back at him, connected through the air.

Mary answered by screaming his name, screaming that Jacob was gone. Someone had taken him.

As Jonathan, Conner and Michael lay on that rocky beach with horrific visions creeping through their brains, as Conner attempted to drop the boy in the box to the bottom of a lake, as Jonathan had stared into the darkest part of the night and felt a horrific presence staring back, Jacob had disappeared. He boarded the bus at 7:30 a.m., attended his classes, played outside during recess under the eye of teachers patrolling the playground, attended more classes and boarded the bus home at 2:30 p.m.The driver let Jacob off at the corner, two doors from his home. Mary normally met him at the bus stop. She had been extra vigilant lately because of the sounds outside the house at night and the scratch marks on the door. But while she stood in the kitchen, putting away the last of the dishes from the dishwasher, she looked out the rear window to the woods behind the house and saw the figure of a man limping through the trees. It was a bright day. The trees were just beginning to shed their leaves and the thick underbrush was wilted and dead. But there in the long shadows cast by the afternoon sun, she had seen a figure moving in and out of the darkness. She was tired. She thought her eyes were playing tricks. It had always been a quiet neighborhood. Everyone knew each other.

But she saw him walking with a strange gait, and she stopped her work and watched, an anxiety growing in her heart that her house and her life were being encroached upon by the unknown. It was like the figure knew she had seen him. It