The Box Set of Hauntings and Horrors

by Jeff DeGordick

  They crept forward across the creaking floorboards, holding onto the cold cement wall next to them for support. The doorway loomed ahead of them, and they could only imagine what was waiting for them. They stepped through.

  A long, heavy table sat in the middle of the room, and an old, large fireplace was perched in the back wall. Some splintered, shriveled firewood was nestled in it, but they both knew that it hadn't been used in years. Odd trinkets and decorations covered the walls, similar to Peter's house, but these were of a much darker sort.

  However, aside from some other random junk and a couple of small pieces of furniture, there was nothing around to see. No children, no witch, no nothing.

  Carmen and Tommy were almost disappointed as they looked around, expecting something more, expecting some kind of dazzling surprise from the mystery that had been built up. It seemed like Peter's suspicions were correct: wherever the witch was, if she even had an actual hideout anymore, it wasn't here. And neither were the children. So then what was going on?

  The two of them were about to leave, when suddenly Tommy spotted something in the corner of his eye. He tugged on his sister's sleeve, and he crouched down, peering underneath the table. The surface of it was so wide and thick that it was hard to see beneath it, even from the doorway. But as Carmen bent down, she saw that there was a thin shelf underneath. And sitting on that shelf was a cardboard box, the kind that someone would pack their cubicle up with when they were fired. It was the only object in the entire house that wasn't scorched black.

  "That must be what Dad brought!" Carmen said. They both rushed over to it and Carmen picked it up and placed it on top of the table. She held her hands on either side of the lid, suddenly too frightened to open it.

  Tommy looked at his sister. "Well? Open it!" he urged.

  But she looked at him with uncertainty. "What if we really don't want to see what's inside?"

  The possibility hit him hard, and suddenly the excitement was washed off his face. He understood her point; what was their father doing here of all places, bringing a box? Whatever it was, it couldn't be good.

  But with this in mind, Carmen knew the best thing to do was to press forward and find out what was going on. She took a deep breath and then she lifted the lid, setting it aside.

  The box seemed to be filled with rags or cloth of some sort, and Carmen cautiously lowered her hands into it and began rummaging around.

  "Ew!" she cried, pulling her hand out. She held it up to the faint light coming in through a basement window and saw that some kind of goop covered her fingers. "Oh, what is that?"

  Tommy leaned forward and peered in the box. He stuck his finger in and pulled it out, inspecting the slime.

  "No, don't you touch it, too!" Carmen said. "Just stand back." She reached in again more cautiously, wiping the goop on the rags inside. She tried another section of the box and pulled her hand out again. "That was a bug," she said miserably. "A dead bug." Her face scrunched up in disgust.

  Tommy stepped forward and rummaged around against her wishes. He pulled out his magnifying glass. "Dead cockroaches," he pronounced. "And beetles. Grasshoppers, too." He sorted through, pulling out fresh weeds and flowers. His hand dipped into the box again, and his thumb and forefinger closed on something, slowly drawing it out. It was long and stringy, and as they both stared at it, they realized it was a shoelace.

  It pulled taut, and Tommy reached down and retrieved the other end of it in horror. A child-sized shoe came out of the box underneath the rags, then Tommy searched again and pulled out a different shoe.

  "Wait a minute..." Carmen said, shivering. She pulled out the rags at the top of the box and unfolded them.

  They weren't rags at all; they were clothes. Children's clothes.

  "Oh no..." Carmen said. "No, no, no... What's Dad doing with this stuff?"

  Tommy stepped back. "Did Dad... hurt them?"

  Carmen snapped her head to him. "No! Tommy, don't think that. Dad would never do something like that. He's not himself right now. All he did was deliver this box." She looked back inside, pulling out more clothes with a heavy heart. All she wanted to know was where he got all this.

  "Wait..." Tommy said. "I recognize this stuff." He pulled out some of the weeds and flowers.

  "Where's it from?" Carmen asked.

  "The church at the edge of town," he said. "That's where the children are."

  In Transit

  The blackened husk of Halloween House stood behind them at the top of the hill as they made their way down through the woods. Tommy occasionally glanced over his shoulder at it, expecting it to march after them and gobble them up. He shivered at the thought.

  The sky started to dim on their way down, and they knew it would still be a while before they made it back to residential streets. This scared Carmen the most. She hadn't expected her father to drive them out so far, and she wasn't sure they would make it back in time before dark. But she tried to keep her brother's spirits up.

  "It's not much further," she said.

  He stared in the distance ahead of them, trying to cut an arrow of vision through the trees and see something—anything—that he recognized. But he couldn't. He swallowed a lump down his throat, and he kept moving.

  Their legs were sore, and they were both filled with a lot of questions. They were certain they'd figured out where the children were being kept, if they were still alive. Tommy remembered that the timothy-grass grew in a little marsh of water at the edge of the church's property, and he recalled when their father and mother would take him and his sister up there on special occasions and he would play around in the flower gardens. But it had been a long time since he'd been there—not since their mom died, in fact—and those were only distant memories. But they had to be right. The only question was, would Peter be able to help them do something to save the kids? Or to defeat the witch? The thought seemed ludicrous to them.

  Carmen's heart sank at the same rate as the sun did, and by the time they neared the edge of the woods, the sun dipped down over the horizon completely, giving the night dominion over them.

  They made it to Lansdowne Road, about the farthest road as they could get from their home. Carmen rubbed her hands together for warmth, putting them up to her mouth and blowing on her cold fingers. Then she took her brother's hands and warmed them up too. He gave her a look as if to ask if they were going to make it, and her own look told him that she didn't know. She didn't want to have to travel back home on foot, and the thought of holing up somewhere else for the night was frightening, to say the least. But she had an idea.

  She figured it must have been about 7:30 or so, and she was sure that there would be a bus coming down the road on Berryman soon. That would take them most of the way home. From there, it was only a few blocks. And then in the morning they could get up bright and early and head to the school to meet up with Peter.

  The streets were mostly empty, but there were still a few cars driving around. They were in a residential area, so there weren't many people on foot, and they were glad for it. When they got to Berryman, they made their way to the bus stop and hunkered inside of the shelter, grateful for the glass walls that shielded them from the wind.

  They stared through them down the road, watching the traffic lights change from red to green and back again. The occasional car would putter along in the distance, and they watched the wildlife moving around with a careful eye. But everything seemed peaceful tonight.

  Headlights shined in the distance. They both looked over at them and saw that they belonged to the number eleven bus. Carmen fished around in her pocket for some change, and she clutched it in her hand. The bus arrived and pulled to a stop next to them with a whine of the brakes. The doors opened, and the driver peered down at them, his eyes cold as ice.

  "Evening," Carmen said quietly as she boarded the bus and dropped the coins in the slot. Tommy followed after her, keeping his eyes on the floor.

  The bus driver closed the doors and eased onto
the accelerator.

  Carmen and Tommy moved down the aisle, holding onto the handrails on the way to steady themselves until they found a seat. The bus was unusually packed, but they spotted two empty seats toward the rear.

  The eyes of every person sitting there fell on them as they moved. No one talked; they just stared. The bus rumbled and gently swayed from side to side over bumps in the road. The two of them found their seats, and they tucked their knees together, sitting quietly with their hands in their laps.

  Most of the eyes wandered back to their normal spots, but often someone would turn their head to look at them directly.

  "Why are they staring at us?" Tommy whispered.

  "Shh!" Carmen said.

  Someone in the middle of the bus started talking, and the sound of a voice cutting through the silence was so alarming that Carmen couldn't help but jump in her seat. It belonged to an older man who looked to be in his sixties, a tight baseball cap clamped to his head. His head was turned, and he was looking at another passenger. Carmen and Tommy couldn't hear what he was saying, but the look in his eyes said it all.

  The man he was talking to was a younger man, maybe in his thirties. He was a large, hulking man with a shaved head and a big beard. Neither of the men looked pleasant, and they certainly didn't look friendly to each other. The other man talked back, and both of their voices rose in volume. Everyone else's eyes fell on them, and soon the first, thinner man stood up and marched to the other one. Normally such a sight would never be seen, but the man was fearless. He punched the larger man in the face.

  Carmen put a hand to her mouth in shock. Her brother started in the seat, just as surprised as she was.

  The larger man didn't take kindly to it, and in the next moment he shot up to his feet, grabbing the man by the collar and barreling through him along the aisle. The man crashed across the laps of two passengers sitting near the front of the bus, and they all cried out in pain.

  The bus driver stared at the scene in his rearview mirror, his gentle touch on the wheel starting to veer.

  More people joined the melee, and those who didn't threw their voices into the fray in anger. The scene quickly devolved into chaos as more people stood up and moved to the middle of the bus, brawling with each other.

  Carmen and Tommy ducked in their seats, trying to wedge themselves down and make themselves as small as possible so they didn't become a target, didn't even provoke the notice of anyone. "Just stay down," she told him. "Just stay down and wait."

  The bus driver became increasingly distracted as he watched the chaos behind him. Then the ruckus came to him as a man was shoved into the driver. The driver's arm was yanked, and the wheel veered along with it. The bus swerved to the side violently before the driver was able to correct it. Everyone was thrown to the left, and Carmen and Tommy held on for dear life so they wouldn't be flung out of their seats.

  Fists were thrown, blood was spilt, teeth flew, and obscenities were hurled as the brawl turned into an all-out dog pile. It spoke to more than just anger; this was pure rage. The townspeople were pushed past the brink, and their fear had been their undoing, giving their power over to the witch and tearing themselves apart.

  "Stay calm," Carmen whispered to Tommy. "Stay calm." He hunkered down, his eyes wide with fear. Eventually he snapped his eyes shut, not wanting to look at the chaos anymore.

  The driver was distracted again and the bus veered once more. It sideswiped a car parked on the road and the driver swung the wheel the other way to correct. But he overcorrected and the bus fishtailed. The hulking mass swerved from side to side on the road, then another car parked on the other side of the street was swiped. Hot sparks splashed into the night as the people inside tumbled around.

  The bus caught a hard turn and Tommy was flung out of his seat.

  "Tommy!" Carmen cried.

  He stumbled across the aisle and reached up, grabbing the top of a seat while his body flailed like a minnow caught on a fishing line. The bus changed direction, and he was thrown into a new seat across the aisle from Carmen.

  The driver lost control completely and the bus headed off the road for a ditch. The wheels sailed over the grass, and the bus came down hard at the bottom of the dip, crashing down on the suspension and compressing everyone's spines. It knocked the wind out of them, and Carmen gasped for breath as the bus hurtled into a tree. The front of it crunched against the thick trunk and caused the back end of the bus to lift off the ground several feet, spin around in the air and crash down onto the wheels, tossing everyone inside around like rag dolls. Finally, the bus's center of balance tipped over and it crashed on its side with a thunderous bang. It glided along the grass for a few yards, then it came to rest.

  When Carmen looked up, her head was spinning and she saw stars. She groaned. Tommy groaned, too, and she realized that he was lying on top of her. When she could summon the strength, she reached over and shook his elbow. "Tommy? Are you okay?"

  He groaned again.

  "Can you move? You have to move."

  Carmen crawled out from under him. She didn't know if she was injured, but she couldn't worry about that now; they were in a crashed and overturned bus, surrounded by the mad and deranged townspeople. If they didn't want to die here tonight, they had to get out now. She pulled herself up enough to peek over the seats into the aisle. The whole bus looked strange now from her new perspective, and she had trouble figuring out which way was which.

  They obviously wouldn't be able to break out of the windows underneath them, and the ones on the other side—which were above them now—seemed too far away and inaccessible to get through. That only left the front of the bus where the door was.

  The people in the bus began to stir, each of them groaning. Some of them started crying out in pain, either from the brawl or from the crash. The driver was slumped against the side of the bus next to the wheel, motionless.

  "Come on, we have to go!" Carmen urged. Her brother continued to groan, but she forced him up, terrified that he had broken something. He held an arm to his stomach as she raised him to his feet, but he held his own footing, and at least those weren't broken.

  "My stomach hurts," he complained.

  "Don't worry about that now," she said. "We have to go for the door!"

  He was slow and cumbersome, but he worked with her, and she guided the two of them over the pile of groaning and wriggling bodies to get to the front. Their footing was uneven as everyone moved underneath them, but they held onto whatever they could to get by. Tommy whined quietly under his breath as he walked, his face scrunched up in pain. But Carmen didn't see any blood on him, and she hoped that he had just been hit in the stomach by something.

  He got halfway through the bus, then the big, lumbering man who'd got punched in the first place, rolled over and grabbed Tommy by the ankle.

  Tommy tripped and fell down on the bodies.

  Carmen spun around. "Tommy!" She grabbed her brother by the wrists, trying to pull him, but the man wouldn't let go.

  "Help me!" Tommy cried, looking behind at the man and trying to kick at him to free himself. But the man's grip was like iron.

  "That's a kid!" Carmen shrieked. "He's just a little kid, you freak!" Carmen struggled, trying to pull her brother with all her might, but the man easily drew Tommy closer to him with strong and measured yanks.

  The thin man with the baseball cap who'd started the fight was roused and shook the stars out of his head, then in the next moment he jumped on the big man and put his hands on his throat, choking the breath out of him. This distracted the large man enough to let go of Tommy, and he and Carmen stumbled toward the front of the bus from the strength by which she was pulling him.

  They scrambled the rest of the way, and Carmen helped Tommy stand on the wall surrounding the incapacitated driver. She pulled the lever, which opened the doors above them, then she hoisted her brother up and he slowly climbed onto the top of the bus. She jumped up, grabbing onto the open door and holding onto anyth
ing she could as she struggled to pull up her weight. Tommy tried to help her on top, and eventually she got free. They found the closest, softest patch of grass they could find, and they jumped down, safely outside of the bus.

  "Are you okay?" Carmen asked Tommy.

  He nodded, feeling a little bit better. He lifted up his shirt, and his stomach had the start of a bruise on it, but it didn't seem like the damage was too bad. "I feel better," he said. "I think something just hit me."

  Carmen tossed a glance at the bus. "We have to get out of here before they start getting out."

  Tommy agreed and they hurried back up to the sidewalk along the road. The bus had run down into a ditch with a long stretch of woods on the other side of it from the road. They kept to the sidewalk, heading straight down, and Carmen thought that would take them home.

  There was a storm tunnel up ahead where water trickled out into the ditch in a steady rhythm. The breeze fluttered through the air, brushing across their exposed skin and gliding up through the trees, making them sway.

  Carmen looked up at the trees at the edge of the woods and for some reason they looked funny to her. She gazed at them carefully, trying to understand what she was seeing, and when she did, her heart stopped.

  The trees were filled with bats, hanging upside down and sleeping.

  Tommy must have seen the look on her face, because he looked up at the trees too, and he screamed.

  The bats' eyes opened in unison, hundreds of them, maybe thousands of them. They screeched, and the wretched sounds filled the sky.

  "Run!" Carmen screamed. She and Tommy took off down the sidewalk as the bats spread their wings and plunged off of their perches. They searched around frantically, but across the bare street, there were only commercial buildings which were locked for the night.