The Winter Box Read online

  “Congratulations!” Todd’s voice booms. “You did it!”

  She looks up and sees his giant silhouette. She supposes it hovered above her the entire time she worked her way through the maze of objects, Todd watching her every move, maybe even taking delight in seeing her hurt herself. She did her best not to look upward while she traveled, and although she hadn’t forgotten about him—how could anyone forget that a Godzilla-sized version of their spouse was looking down at them?—she was able to keep her focus on moving forward. But now she isn’t moving, and she has nothing to distract her from the behemoth above.

  Clapping, she realizes then. That sound was him clapping, three slow, sarcastic claps, as if he were making light of her accomplishment. Anger explodes within her and she jumps to her feet, ignoring her ankle’s protests and turns her head to the sky.

  “Fuck you!” she shouts. “If you think it’s so easy, you come down here and try it!”

  He chuckles, the sound like distant rolling thunder.

  “I don’t think I’d fit.”

  She’s so furious all she wants to do is scream obscenities at him, but she restrains herself. She needs him if she wants to get out of the box.

  “I did as you asked,” she says, her voice surprisingly steady. “Let me out.” She pauses, then adds, “Please.”

  “You’ve got plenty of stuff to stand on and help you climb out. You don’t need me.”

  He speaks these last four words in a softer tone, one that she would describe as almost pouty. She recognizes that tone. She’s heard him use it often enough over the years. She thinks of it as his Little Boy voice, and he uses it whenever he’s feeling needy but doesn’t want to come out and say what he wants. And she knows exactly how to respond to it.

  “I’m so tired, Todd. And I hurt myself, too. I sprained my ankle and maybe broke my hand. I don’t think I can drag objects around and pile them on top of each other and climb out. I need help.” And then she speaks the three words she knows he’s waiting to hear. “I need you.”

  Nothing happens for a moment, and then the silhouette shifts. A length of darkness separates from it and begins coming toward her, details sharpening as it draws near. It’s Todd’s hand, and it’s the size of a small house. She knows she shouldn’t be afraid. This is her husband, and despite the recent troubles between them, she knows that he would never, ever, do anything to hurt her. But she is afraid, absolutely fucking terrified to the core. She imagines this is what a small animal—a baby bird or rabbit—must feel like when a human tries to pick it up. Her heart pounds like a rapid drumbeat in her ears, and she can feel pressure building in her chest. She wonders if her heart will explode like a blood-filled balloon. If it does, will she feel it when it happens, or will she die instantly, her consciousness extinguished as easily as someone blowing out a candle? She decides it’ll probably hurt like a bitch. If life is so hard, why should death be any easier?

  His thumb and forefinger slow as they get closer, and he takes hold of the back of her blouse with surprising gentleness. He lifts her into the air slowly, and she watches the box and the items it holds dwindle in size the higher she rises. Todd moves his other hand under her, palm up, and gently sets her down. He raises her toward his face then, and instead of being frightened—at least, any more frightened—she’s confused. Maybe it’s because of their vast size difference, but he looks younger. Much younger, like he did when they first met, when he was barely a man and she barely a woman. Were they ever really that young? She finds the thought nearly incomprehensible, and this saddens her for reasons she can’t quite understand.

  “We belong together,” Todd says. He whispers, but his voice still sounds loud, like rushing wind, and his cold breath envelops her like winter’s chill. “Just like we used to be, back when we were so close it was like we were one person. You killed us, Heather. You and him. Killed our love. But it’s not too late to make things right. We can be one again, all of us. You just have to stop fighting.”

  She has no idea what he’s talking about, but there’s an edge to his words coupled with a disturbing gleam in his eyes that she thinks might be madness, or something close to it.

  “You’re so sweet, Heather.” His mouth stretches into a fifty-foot-wide smile. “So sweet you’re good enough to eat.”

  He opens his mouth and tosses her inside. She doesn’t have time to scream.

  * * *

  She sat up abruptly and looked around for a moment, unsure who she was, let alone where she was. A fire burned in front of her, but it did little to warm the air around her. She’d been wrapped in a blanket, but it had fallen off of her when she sat up. She grabbed it and drew it around her shoulders once more, but it didn’t help. The fabric felt as if it were suffused with cold and would never be warm again.

  She looked to her left and saw Todd. Like her, he was sitting up, and he had a confused, almost wild look on his face, like a feral animal who feels trapped.

  “You had a dream,” she said.

  He nodded slowly. “More like a nightmare. You?”

  She nodded. “Mine was about the Winter Box.”

  “Mine too.”

  They looked at each other for several moments, neither speaking. Finally, Todd said, “Something happened when I was outside earlier. I…thought I saw you. A younger version of you. In the snow…almost part of it somehow.”

  “Something happened to me in the kitchen when you were outside. Someone came up behind me. Spoke to me in your voice. He…” She couldn’t bring herself to mention the bite mark on her neck. “Touched me,” she finished, then realized that sounded almost as bad as He bit me. “He sounded younger than you. He was in my dream, too.”

  “And you were younger in my dream,” Todd said. “What the fuck is going on, Heather? What are we experiencing? Hallucinations caused by extreme cold?”

  She wished it were that simple.

  “No. This is different. Some of the things you—younger you—said in my dream made it sound as if he was separate from the present you.”

  He thought for a moment. “The other you said similar things in my dream.”

  “He was angry. He said he wanted to know why—”

  “Our relationship had changed,” Todd interrupted.

  She nodded. “And why we’d changed. Almost as if by changing, we’d betrayed them somehow.”

  “Yes.”

  If this had been any other time, she would’ve found it ludicrous—if not downright insane—that they were talking about apparitions and dreams as if they were real. But now, with the power out, the house cold inside, the winter storm raging outside—and especially the throbbing bite mark on the back of her neck—it didn’t seem ludicrous at all.

  She’d noticed that Todd’s voice was a little raspy and he kept swallowing and occasionally touching his throat. His left eye, too. She wondered if he’d been marked as she had.

  “They’re like ghosts, aren’t they?” he said. “Our ghosts. Except we’re not dead.” He let out a bark of a laugh that sounded more than a little unhinged. “Unless we are dead and don’t know it.”

  Something about what he said struck a chord in her.

  “What if they are ghosts, not of us, but of our marriage?”

  He looked at her as if she was crazy, which at this point, she admitted to herself, was a real possibility. She went on.

  “Our relationship has been on life support for a while, let’s face it, and now it’s pretty much dead. We haven’t spoken the D word aloud, either of us, but we’ve been thinking about it. I have, and I bet you have, too. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

  He said nothing.

  “Maybe love has a life of its own. It can be born and grow, so why can’t it wither and die? And why can’t the ghost of it return to demand answers of those who let it die? Who killed it?”

  He shook his head. “That is absolutely insane, Heather. Love is an emotion, and emotions are chemically generated in the brain. They don’t have independent life of their o
wn.”

  Despite his words, his tone was uncertain, as if he were trying to convince himself just as much if not more than her.

  A new thought occurred to her. “You said the box figured in your dream?”

  He touched his throat again. “Yeah, kind of.”

  “Maybe that’s the focal point of all this. Think about it. In ghost stories, spirits always have some kind of link that ties them to the physical. A place where they died, or some kind of object that was important to them when they were alive.”

  “And the Winter Box isn’t just an object,” he said slowly, as if thinking this through. “It’s also filled with other objects. Dozens of them.”

  “Bits and pieces of memories and emotions, all connected to our relationship.”

  They looked at each other for several moments, alone with their thoughts. Finally, Todd said, “Let’s assume your theory is correct. What the hell can we do about it?”

  Her answer was immediate.

  “Destroy the box and everything in it.”

  “Are you serious? You love the box and what it represents. It’s an important tradition to you. Even if…when we divorce, I figured you’d still want to keep it, kind of like a 3-D version of a photo album or something.”

  The bite mark on her neck throbbed anew.

  “Not anymore.”

  Without waiting for Todd’s response, she shrugged off the blanket, stood, and went into the living room. The Winter Box sat closed on the couch, and she picked it up and carried it back to the fireplace. Its smooth wooden surface was so cold, it stung her fingers, but she didn’t care. She put the box on the floor in front of the fireplace, knelt, removed the grate and set in on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Todd asked. “That’s a gas fireplace, remember? There’s no flue. If you put the box in there, smoke will pour into the house.”

  “Fuck the house.”

  She picked up the box, placed it atop the fake log inside, and pulled her hands back quickly so she wouldn’t get burned. Other than remind her about the lack of a flue, Todd did nothing to stop her. The box caught fire at once, and black smoke curled upward from the wood. Since it had no place to go, it coiled outward and rose toward the ceiling where a large soot mark began to form.

  Heather and Todd stood, moved back from the fireplace, and watched the box burn. Heather half-expected there to be some kind of dramatic reaction from the box. Unearthly screaming voices, an explosion of eerie green light, maybe even a manifestation of the ghosts—or whatever they were—materializing so they could try to stop the box’s destruction. But none of those things happened. The box simply continued to burn and slowly fill the room with smoke.

  “We should turn off the fire and douse the box with water before it gets any worse,” Todd said, although he didn’t sound particularly worried.

  She thought she understood his reaction, or rather lack of one. This whole situation was so unreal, it numbed you, made you feel disconnected from what was happening, as if you were only an observer and not a participant.

  “We have to wait until the box and everything in it burns,” she said. “It’s the only way to be—”

  At that precise instant, every window in the house exploded inward.

  * * *

  There was a bay window in the room where the fireplace was located, and when it exploded, Todd dove toward Heather. He managed to get his arms around her just as a torrent of wind, glass, and snow struck them. Despite his attempt to shield her, glass shards struck them both, and then the wind slammed them into the wall next to the fireplace. They fell to the floor, and Todd lay there, Heather sprawled on top of him. He tried to ask her if she was okay, but he’d had the breath knocked out of him and couldn’t speak. He glanced at the fireplace and saw the box no longer burned. The outside was charred and blackened, but for the most part, the box appeared intact. A couple small flames clung stubbornly to the box’s surface, but as he watched they flickered in the wind that still rushed through the broken window, diminished and died, taking the last of the light with them.

  He felt fiery stings of pain on his arms, back, neck, and scalp from where glass had struck him, but the cold was the strongest sensation by far. The sudden plunge in temperature hit his system like an electric shock, and he wondered if this was what those lunatics who jumped naked into freezing water felt like. He’d read somewhere that the shock of hitting water that cold could stop your heart. He believed it.

  With the fire out, it was dark in the house and he couldn’t see Heather’s face. She hadn’t moved since she hit the wall, though, and he feared the worst. He was still having trouble drawing in enough air to speak, and it didn’t help that the air inside was now so fucking cold it felt like ice crystals seared his nasal passages and throat when he tried to breathe. Still lying on the floor, snow gusting in from outside and starting to form drifts around them, he shook Heather. Gently at first, and then more vigorously. He knew that you weren’t supposed to move an injured person, but right now there wasn’t much choice. If the two of them didn’t get up and do something fast, this intense cold would kill them. That is, if something else didn’t do the job first.

  Heather stirred, and he thought he heard her moan, but the wind blowing in from the broken window was so loud, he wasn’t sure. He moved out from under her and helped her into a sitting position. He leaned close to her ear and spoke loudly to be heard over the wind.

  “Try to stand!”

  Without waiting for her reply, he stood and pulled her up with him. She shivered violently, but he couldn’t tell if it was due to the cold or her injuries. Probably both, he decided. She was up, though, and that was what mattered. Holding onto her arm, he led her into the living room. The window in there was broken as well—he assumed every window in the house was—and snow covered the floor, with more coming in every second. It was like instead of a snowstorm outside, there was a flood, and water was pouring into their house by the gallon. He led Heather into the foyer, groped for the coat closet knob, found it, and opened the door. The two of them had already been dressed in several layers of clothes and were wearing shoes, but that wasn’t enough to protect against this cold. Moving as quickly as he could, Todd found a pair of winter coats and helped Heather into hers before donning his own. His coat wasn’t as heavy as the one he’d worn to clear the driveway, but that one was still out in the garage, and he didn’t want to go back for it. Same for his boots. He’d just have to make do with shoes.

  Heather was moving better on her own now, and he hoped that meant she wasn’t as badly injured as he’d feared. Once they had their coats on, they donned hats, scarves, and gloves. Todd still felt cold as hell, and the wounds he’d suffered when the bay window exploded stung like hell, but his coat blunted the worst of the wind that tore through the house, and at least that was something.

  “What do we do now?” Heather shouted. Her voice sounded stronger than he’d expected, encouraging him further. “Go down to the basement?”

  There were no windows down there, and because of the earth around them, basements tended to remain at a steady temperature year round, never too hot or too cold. But he no longer believed that this was a natural snowstorm—not around their house, anyway—and he wasn’t confident the intense cold wouldn’t reach them down there. It was a like a living creature, and he feared it would find them wherever they went. Plus, there were other things out to get them. A pair of them, in fact. If they could attack Heather and him in their dreams, then a locked basement door wouldn’t prove much of an obstacle for them.

  He remembered what Heather had said about ghosts being bound to something physical. Maybe they hadn’t been able to destroy the box completely, but if they left the house, the box—and presumably the non-ghosts that it had brought into whatever sort of strange existence they possessed—would remain here, too. And if the storm was only this violent because the spirits were somehow making it so, once they got far enough from the house, they should be safe. It was a l
ogical plan—if logic had any kind of place in the fucked-up nightmare they were currently living—and he quickly told Heather what he was thinking. She agreed, and they turned toward the door.

  The door was made of thick wood and had no glass to shatter, so it had withstood the assault of the wind and snow. Todd groped for the knob in the dark, found it, and was about to turn it. But he could hear the wind outside pounding at the door, felt the knob vibrating in his hand. If he tried to open the door, the wind and snow would blast inside and slam both him and Heather to the floor. Better to go out one of the windows. They’d still have to fight the wind, but it would be easier and safer. Although at this point, he knew safer was a relative term.

  “Let’s try a window instead!” he shouted.

  Heather agreed, and they headed back into the living room. The wind continued driving snow through the opening, but most of the glass was gone, so they wouldn’t have to worry about cutting themselves. Heather was more slender and weighed less than he did, so Todd helped her through the window then followed after. It took some effort on both their parts. Pushing against the wind and the biting snow was like trying to walk upstream through rapids. But they made it, and once they were outside, the wind—while just as strong—wasn’t confined, and they found its force dissipated somewhat, making it, if not easy to walk, at least possible.

  Between the dark and the roiling snow, visibility was almost nonexistent. Todd took Heather’s hand and they trudged in the direction of the street, making their way as best could through drifts that sometimes rose as high as their waists. Todd told himself it didn’t matter what direction they went, as long as it was away from the house. Once they were far enough away to be safe—although he had no idea how they would know when they reached that point—they could try to seek shelter in one of their neighbors’ houses. Even if the house they reached belonged to a stranger, Todd was hopeful they’d let him and Heather in. No one would turn them away, not in this weather. The biggest problem would be surviving long enough to reach shelter. Their winter clothes were just the normal variety and only did so much to protect them from the cold. Their progress was torturously slow, and after a while, Todd began to fear that he’d made a terrible mistake, that they never should’ve left the house, that they should’ve remained there and faced their other selves, whatever the hell they really were. But it was too late to go back now. They had to keep moving forward if they were to have any hope of survival.