The Box at the Top of the Closet, Part 3

Trigger Warning: This piece contains violence, mental health trauma, and animal harm. Sensitive readers should exercise caution.

This story is part of a three-part series. Read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

Crickets and bulbous frog croaks filled the air as Eric stood on the slope of a terraced hillside. To his right, a big, brick house loomed, tangled in the skeletal shadows of the moon shining through the leafless trees. Further down the slope from him in a flat clearing, a figure worked in the moonlight, digging. 

The figure’s silver silhouette resembled a gravedigger from an old gothic novel, but Eric recognized him immediately — the tall, brown-haired man. Why am I not inside him, like before? Eric wondered.

But before any answer could come, he was drawn to other details: A bulging, black garbage bag seemed to be spilling its contents near the man’s feet, but in the darkness, Eric couldn’t make out any details other than the shovel propped against it. 

The man swung a pickaxe, bringing it down to the dirt several times in a row before standing up straight for a moment. He wiped his hand across his brow. “Son of a bitch has me burying his damn deer! Out here in the fucking dark, so nobody can see. Like anyone fucking cares!”

The man exchanged the pickaxe for the shovel and continued digging for several more minutes, until he was interrupted by the other man Eric had seen before — the brown-haired man’s father. 

“Dig that hole nice and deep, you hear me!” the father shouted at his son. “We don’t want anything digging it up.”

“Why don’t you come bury it yourself?” the brown-haired man mumbled.

“What did you say to me! Don’t you back-talk me, boy!”

“I’m not. I said I’ll bury it good and deep.” The son kicked at the bag. “You want it to stay in this garbage bag, right?”

The father leaned down like a bull ready to charge, his voice growing steadily more gravelly as he answered, “Yeah. Don’t want no stink. Don’t want nothing to dig it up. And don’t you get holes in that bag either. You hear me? Did you double-bag it like I told you? I’ll go get another trash bag and throw it down to you.” 

The father walked back into the house, and Eric heard the vague sounds of television laughter coming from the inside.

The brown-haired man looked down at the garbage bag as it glinted in the moonlight. He kicked it, and it gave way with a juicy squish. 

Bloody innards, shiny in the moonlight, oozed onto the ground around his feet. Several yards of intestines fell out; then a large, undulating stomach that molded itself to the ground and around his shoe; and finally a softball-sized heart that rolled across his foot and into the grave beside him. 

“Fuck!”

“What’d you do now?” barked his father, rematerializing out of the darkness.

Eric jumped. But the brown-haired man didn’t seem affected, as if this were common.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s the damn guts. Some spilled out when I moved the bag. It’s hard to see what I’m doing down here with all these tree shadows. Can’t I use a flashlight?”

The father grunted sharply. “No. I don’t want nobody seeing anything from the road. Here’s that other trash bag. Get them guts picked up quick.” He pitched another glinting black bag into the darkness, in the general direction of his son.

“But it’s our property. It won’t matter if people see us using a flashlight.”

“Get back to work.”

Eric woke, his mind reeling. He was no closer to knowing who those men were than when he first saw them. What was their intent? Why the grave? First, they’d killed an opossum to quiet a dog. Now this hole to hide a bagful of deer parts. It made no sense. 

And where was the rest of the deer? Like its head — where was that? Eric turned to stare out the window, and realized he was sitting in his car in a grocery store parking lot. All around him, on the seats and floorboards, were black garbage bags and empty garbage bag boxes. 

He had been passed out long enough to sleep-drive to the store, sleep-shop for the garbage bags, and then sleep-pull every last one of them out of their boxes. A cold shiver clawed at the sides of his face, moved down his body, and settled into his stomach like a heavy, indigestible rock. What was it doing to him? What was it planning? 

Clearly, Eric thought, it has some plan for me. He jerked his head around to see if anyone was staring at him, ogling him while calling the police. But no one gave him a second glance. 

People were walking to and from their cars, keys jingling — laughing, crying, talking. They got into their cars and motored happily away to their next errand. None looked his way. He may as well have not existed. 

Maybe that’s what it wants, he thought. He considered the possibilities, his brow furrowing. Then the corner of his mouth smirked. “Well, I’ll show it!” he said aloud. He rolled down his window and drove home.

With his arms full of the garbage bags, Eric found it hard to open his front door. They were surprisingly slippery. He dropped several as he fumbled for the right key, but he picked up as many as he could and kicked the rest across the threshold. Then he threw a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure no neighbors were observing this crazy ceremony. 

None were. This part of the world seemed just as disinterested in his affairs as the shoppers downtown. He shut the door behind him, dropped the rest of the bags, and strode to the kitchen.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cooked himself a proper meal. The thought made him suddenly ravenous. He turned on the stove to get water boiling, then went to the pantry to dig out some spaghetti and sauce. 

Within an hour, he was seated at his kitchen table, tucking into a plate of noodles, meatballs, and golden-brown garlic bread. Every few mouthfuls, he drank water from a red plastic tumbler and smiled. A job well done. The sunlight transluced the tumbler so that it looked like pink rivulets streamed down the sides of his cheeks with each gulp. 

“A fine last supper,” he announced, and shoveled the rest of the meal into his mouth as quickly as he could.

Later, upstairs in his own bedroom, he found himself kneeling beside his bed as if praying. Why not give it a try? he thought. It can’t make things worse. 

“For my sanity, I suppose, or maybe for this cup to pass,” he said. 

Then he remembered he was looking for an old, comfortable pair of shoes stored under the bed. He found them and shoved them into the black garbage bag in his other hand. He frowned at the ramshackle collection of other clothes, toiletries, and knick-knacks in the bag. 

Pulling a beat up, dog-eared copy of The World According to Garp out of the bag, he smiled at the goofy 1970s illustration of a pilot sucking his thumb on the cover.

But his smile faded, and he put his head in his hands. He didn’t know who was in charge anymore. He didn’t remember packing the bag or coming upstairs. He looked around and saw that all the other bags were already filled and tied off. Their black plastic winked reflected light back at him from the corner of his room.

Eric couldn’t explain it. He didn’t understand why he had packed these bags.

“Yes, you do!” The voice made Eric jump, and he looked down to see the pilot on the cover staring up at him. “You are making your stand, once and for all!”

Eric’s smile slowly crept up his cheeks again. That’s it! he thought. I’ll show all this to the box right now!

Eric grabbed up handfuls of bags, as many as he could carry, marched to the closet, and threw open the door. There it was. The little black box sat up there on its high, wide shelf in the bright white at the top of the closet. He threw the bags unceremoniously, one after another, up to that shelf and then clambered up after them. 

He grabbed the little box, shoving garbage bags out of the way to get to it, and shouted, “Do your worst!”

Instantly, he found himself back in the deep, tight darkness of that tunnel he had first seen. The dark silence weighed on him, tightening around him with oppressive force. Unlike before, he couldn’t sense anyone with him. 

Where was the tall, brown-haired man? This was his journey, so why wasn’t he here? Then Eric felt the box in his hand. Its angles bit into his palm and the heft of it assured him of its presence. 

“Where are we going?” he asked, but his voice didn’t even echo. It seemed to leave his mouth with a hot breath and then simply disappear. The only way through is forward, he told himself. Eric put one foot in front of the other and began walking. He looked straight forward into the darkness. He didn’t wave his arms around to detect obstacles. He walked with purpose.

It might have been days or years or just an hour, but he kept walking until he thought he felt a change in the air. Was something breathing on him? Was something in here with him? 

His heart jumped and he wanted to run, but instinctively knew he shouldn’t. He could fall and break a bone, or he could turn down some hidden pathway and never find the end of the tunnel. Eric took a deep breath, and walked on.

The weight of the darkness compressed more about him, forcing him to stoop as he kept walking. Eric walked for so long this way that his back began to burn with the fire of angry muscles. But he dared not straighten up. 

Soon he was crawling on all fours, wincing with every forward inch at the thought of what unnamable thing his hands might touch. Then he thought of the black bags. 

They weren’t in his hands. Eric paused. Had he dropped them? They would be monstrously hard to find in this darkness. Then he realized — the box was gone too! 

He sighed and sat back on his feet, trying to think. How could he have lost it? It had been with him the whole way; how could he have been so careless? What would it think of him? 

“I’m a bug,” Eric said, and slapped his face. “A useless bug, so far beneath it that I don’t count for anything.” He slapped himself again.

No sooner did his hand leave his face than he felt a pop. A snap, like a strained muscle pulling away from bone. Eric blinked. He was no longer on his hands and knees; in fact he didn’t seem to have them anymore. He couldn’t feel the cold concrete under his hands, nor feel his flaming, angry back. 

He felt adrift, but then the darkness changed.

The black gloom shifted to gray, then to silver, and then to full white-hot light. The black tunnel opened up, its exit a widening funnel into the daylight. And Eric could see a man in front of him, carrying all the black garbage bags in one hand. 

And in the other hand, the box. 

This was not the tall, blue-eyed, brown-haired man from before. This was Eric’s body, but he was no longer in it. The body walked toward a house, but there had been no houses on the other end of the tunnel — it had been a hillside above an ocean. 

This was the house Eric had driven to the night he was out of his mind. Except now it was daylight and there was a For Sale sign in the yard.

The body walked across the yard to the side of the house, then looked behind itself to make sure no one was watching. It looked right through Eric, saw nothing to concern it, then proceeded along the side of the house through an organic tunnel of vines and ornamental trees to the back porch. Eric followed.

The body put down the bags and opened the back door with a key from its pocket. The door swung wide open, and the body looked behind itself once again. Satisfied, it picked up the bags. Eric followed again as it walked in and closed the door.

Eric followed the body upstairs to a large closet. The body opened the door and reached for the pull-chain connected to a lightbulb. The closet burst into life, revealing a top shelf full of bright white luminescence. 

The body stood on tiptoe and placed the black box in the middle of the top shelf. The body then picked up all the black garbage bags and walked to a large bedroom.

Eric stared from the box to the body standing in the bedroom doorway. He wanted to speak but his voice wouldn’t work. Not even the sound of his breath came out. He was only vision and hearing and emotions now. 

He floated up to look at it at the top of the closet. The box seemed to stare him down with all its shiny black faces. Eric reached for it, lifted it, and found he could no longer feel its heft. Cold pins and needles spread across his face, and his eyes narrowed. He wanted to scream at it that it was being unfair, that it had used him, that it had stolen his life. 

But he couldn’t. He had no voice.

Then, Eric heard something he had thought impossible before now. It laughed.

At first it came as a low rumble, as if from the belly in response to a funny joke. Then the pitch turned maniacal, rising higher and higher, until Eric thought he couldn’t take it anymore and that he would burst out of what little existence he had left. Instinct told him he couldn’t protect himself so close to the source. He had to leave. Now.

Abruptly, the laugh started over again with its slowly building rumble.

Eric dropped down from the top of the closet and floated down the hallway to the bedroom where his body had gone. To his horror, he found the body standing on a small stepladder, pulling back an access cover at the top of the bedroom closet. The body poked its head inside for a moment, as if assessing the space, then it stooped down to pick up a black garbage bag. 

Floating inside the bedroom, Eric looked around the space, from the body moving the bags to the blank walls, and wondered if this was his final end. I haven’t figured out the visions yet, he thought, I don’t even know where the box came from.

Then he heard a friendly chuckle coming from the floor. Eric looked down, and his eyes widened. His Garp paperback lay on the floor where there had been nothing but bags before.

The pilot on the cover pulled his thumb out of his mouth and said, “Those visions are so far beyond knowable that it’ll take someone smarter than either of us to interpret them. But one thing is for certain: You — your body — brought the box here to hide it in that closet for some other hapless victim.”

Icy pins and needles prickled down Eric’s face. He looked from the paperback on the floor to his detached body.

One by one, the body tossed those bags into the crawlspace above the bedroom. And all the while, the fanatical laughter from the hallway closet echoed through the house. 

Never-ending. 

Always cycling from a slow, buzzing mumble up to that unsettling supersonic giggle, then back again. Over and over, an eternal, gloating laughter.

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This story might be over, but our supply of other pieces goes on!

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