That was the best day of his life. However, misfortune was about to happen.
7
Two days after that, Ben slipped on the hot water bucket when he was ready to take a bath, and he hit his head, leaving him knocked out instantly and with such bad luck of getting his head inside the bucket filled with water. The water turned red. His eyes rolled inside his head and a grey mass came out of his head, dripping on his neck. But he died drowned. Like in the dream, although not in the Crystal Lake and without showing those sharp yellow teeth.
The burial was on Wednesday afternoon. Steve had dug the hole on the local cemetery and saw his brother lay dead inside his coffin. There were no signs of blood or brain matter anymore. It looked like Ben was sleeping but with a rare face color. White. The priest led the religious ceremony and it started to rain.
At night, Ben said goodbye to Steve.
8
The noise of splashes coming from footsteps behind the bedroom door woke him up. Steve sat on his bed clutching the sheets with his fists closed to his throat, like his life depended on that. He was on the shadows. An easily recognizable silhouette. Dark, of low height and a little chubby. There were no other shadows or lights but the ones your vision produces when it looks into the dark for a while. It was him. It was Ben.
‘Ben, is that you?’
The answer was a short silence followed by another splash when he took another step.
‘Ben, I know it’s you. Don’t scare me brother!’ said Steve humorously with his eyes wide open and clutching the sheets even harder.
‘It’s me brother.’ Finally said a broken voice. ‘I’ve come to warn you. Be careful with her. The fat freckled girl from class.’
‘What?’ his voice sounded shaky. ‘Cassandra?’
‘Yes.’
‘But she’s object of mockery from everyone. She’s always alone. She’s a fat, freckled and pretty ugly girl to me. There’s nothing wrong with her.’
‘She can move objects with her mind,’ whispered Ben’s corpse, now close to Steve, almost touching his face, with his body covered in dirt, smelly and puffy.
‘You scare me, Ben.’
‘Don’t be. I’m your brother,’ he took a step back, not before showing a watery eye.
After this, Ben’s body left Steve’s room going down the stairs with a splash in every footstep. That night, Steve didn’t sleep either, but on the next day, he went to school.
9
On Friday, when Steve entered the classroom, he fixed his eyes on Cassandra, who was sitting on the end of the classroom, on the left side, with her face hidden behind her long copper hair. Steve walked to his seat while his eyes were focused on her. The girl had her face hidden from every possible angle. Now, she was on Steve’s right. She did not lift her head. Her straight and static hair was on her desk. Steve kept looking at her with the corner of his eye while he took his seat and left his bag on the floor. She did not move at all. Every student took their seats and a couple of them, Tommy and Chris, threw such paper balls to her head. One of them hit her. And she kept her face hidden, the hair straight and her head down. Without moving.
‘Fat,’ said Tommy at the same time he sat on his chair.
On his side, Chris laughed.
You know? My brother, who is dead, says that Cassandra can move things with her mind. Ohh.
Steve shook his head unconsciously. Absurd, he thought.
‘Ugly,’ now Chris was looking at his friend.
Steve couldn’t do anything for her because, just like her, he was object of insults. His glasses, his height that made him look like he crouched when he walked, just like a vulture when he finds carrion. He couldn’t do anything. He was object of mockery too.
And Cassandra knew...
The teacher came in to the classroom in that moment, clapping his hands.
‘Come on boys and girls. Math class is about to start,’ he walked straight to his desk, and when he turned around, he left the blackboard visible behind him. He lifted an arm and with his index finger, he pointed it to a student. He made a gesture with his mouth and dropped his arm. The student took a seat.
The class started and nothing else happened.
10
That night Steve had another nightmare. This time he saw Cassandra with her face hidden by her copper hair, she remained still unmoved like in reality. And no, she didn’t lift her head to show some sharp teeth. She was simply there, hidden, quiet, while all the boys and girls of the class throw paper balls at her. Someone threw an eraser at bounced like a projectile to the window that was at her right.
‘Fat! Ugly!’ screamed everyone.
Steve was watching this entire riot that had formed around her from a spot, where it seemed that no one had noticed that he was there. In class. It was like if his body was floating in the corner of the class, like a viewer. Boys running around the classroom, girls making fun of her. Boisterous scenery. And all of a sudden, someone threw the enormous and heavy blackboard’s eraser at Cassandra’s head. It sounded clear and dry, like a branch breaking in half. The eraser fell to the floor and after it, a drop of blood, just like a drop of rain but thicker. Cassandra lifted her head showing a lot of freckles in her cheek bones and angry eyes. Her lips moved slightly in an incontrollable act and she frowned.
In the corner of the classroom, there was a boy smoking a cigarette while he was smiling contemptuously. By his side, there were two other boys.
And Cassandra did it.
The wooden eraser moved and flew, like it was thrown by a canon, to the kid with the cigarette, at the same time that Cassandra’s desk elevated from the floor, waving. The impact on that kid’s face was thunderous and sounded louder than the voices that continued screaming at Cassandra, alien to the eraser. The boy fell back and the lit cigarette fell into a wastebasket full of paper that, casually, was beneath his feet. The boy cried in pain and from Cassandra’s forehead fell a drip of blood until it reached her upper lip.
And then, everything happened.
All the chalks of the blackboard started to fly through the air. At first, no one noticed, except Steve that kept watching the scenery like if he was now behind a window. Out of nowhere, everyone fell quiet. The desks started to lift from the floor, like drones. The pages of the books that were on the desks flipped quickly and some book were shot against boys and girls from the class, which changed the silence for screams of pain.
The contents of the teacher’s wastebasket, which wasn’t there, started to burn in that moment. The boy with the cigarette noticed a sudden heat in one of his legs. The fire was eating the leg of his pants, up to his right knee. He jumped and tried to put out the fire with his hands but he screamed with pain instead. The boys that were with him decided to take off his pants pulling from the other leg. The boy that was now lying on the floor looked at his hands. They were red and skin strips were hanging from them, like his pants, like threads.
The fire spread to the teacher’s desk and there, the pages of the books and some papers started to burn. The screams grew higher and penetrating. Everyone was running around the room and she was doing it. Every object was hitting the students and Cassandra’s forehead showed more wrinkles. She was “pushing”.
The fire spread and started to rise the temperature. Some boys tried to open the windows, but these seemed sealed, impossible to open. The door was also locked. Then, Cassandra stood up. She touched the pool of her blood with her big toe. The fire spread more and more.
Then, Steve tried to scream but he couldn’t. He woke up all of a sudden with a gasp and the body covered in sweat. His heart was racing like crazy. He panted several times and noticed he was rigid on his bed in the middle of the night. It was a nightmare.
Or maybe not.
11
The initials D.E.K came back to Steve’s mind like if these were marked with fire. He still didn’t know the meaning, but that meant the same to him because he remembered reading something like his dream in the box. He pulled
out a bunch of milk bills written by hand on the back. A story with a disappointing ending. Then, he pulled out a manuscript that smelled like beer called “The freaks are out there”, nothing extraordinary. This wasn’t it. He pulled out another manuscript with a letter marked with a cross in the upper left part. There was a phrase that read: “To my little blue eyed girl that moves things”. Yes. He had found it.
‘Great, here you are,’ he whispered.
He started to read the letter. In it said that the novel didn’t match the dynamics of the editorial. Practically, they will tell you to fuck off with politically correct words. Steve smiled. He had received some of those letters himself. Of course, he was only thirteen years old and his writing wasn’t polished. Besides, his ideas were crazy. Or maybe not.
On the bottom corner, there was a number and some words written by hand: “30 times rejected”.
‘Shit’
Under this, there was another word written. Steven read a peculiar word: “telekinesis”
‘Shit!’ the exclamation sounded louder.
And to the left, there was a phrase also written by hand: “everyone hated her, even her mother” and under this, at the end of the letter “it really happened”.
Steve opened his lips making a perfect O. his eyes illuminated and he remembered part of the dream, like a movie in rewind. His heart started to beat faster. Outside, on the window, the snowflakes formed strange drawings again. In Crystal Lake, Maine, it always snowed. It was obnoxious to stand so much cold.
With his right foot, he pushed the box full of stories, and this slid under his bed. But he held in his hands the manuscript called “The strange one”.
You know, Steve? Don’t kid yourself. You know this is a lie. It’s a word game. It’s fiction. Or maybe not.
The sunlight didn’t shine at that moment, except for the light of the candles that projected creepy shadows on the walls. Steve agitated a hand and turned the first page. His eyes flickering under the light of the candles. He turned a second page and a third and so on, until he found it. He had wanted to remember and he knew it from the first moment. He had read it somewhere. Nightmares are just a matter of projecting what you have seen in some part of your life and turn it into a terrifying dream. Something that marked you in the shadows and later showed itself in the REM phase of a dream. Until you wake up with your heart in your hand.
After all, there it was...
With his index finger, he followed the phrase, which he read out loud.
‘When the fireman arrived to the scene, everything was burned to the ground. The classroom ceiling fell off. The rest of the school was intact but there were still some flames licking the blue sky, and right after this, there was a smoke column as black as the depths of a black hole. It was the sixth graders class. After two hours of hard work and thousands of liters of water, the firemen could get inside the center itself of the catastrophe. Underneath the debris there were the carbonized bodies of all the students of the class. No one cried for help. They were all dead. And some time after, when they counted and recognized the bodies (a phase of a complex identification by the relatives, who recognized them by the clock or the pendant, which had often been united with the blackened flesh, melted into a single mass)...’ he had to make a pause to swallow and advanced several lines without reading until he stopped in one of them and continued reading out loud. ‘They counted twenty three bodies and she wasn’t there. The strange girl wasn’t there. Her great crucifix would have betrayed her.
Steve stopped reading all of a sudden and took a step back breathing heavily. The manuscript fell to his feet and the paragraphs got lost when the pages dispersed on the floor.
‘This caused the nightmare,’ he said and turned off the candles with a blow before going to bed.
12
In the next to weeks he didn’t have any nightmare. The cold winter hit Crystal Lake with fury and constancy. The Petrie were poor and had nothing to keep themselves warm, except for the blankets. The days they waiter to take a shower grew considerably because of the cold. His mother worked cleaning houses, although this kept her out of her own house for too long. His sister, of long nose and thin lips, reminded him very often that he had to find a steady job and bring something to the table, but she remained at home. She said that everything will come. But nothing comes in the moment you want it the most. Her boyfriend (if that’s what he is after she got knocked up for the second time) disappeared a few days later. And still hasn’t showed up again. So, Leia was a single mother of two, one of them already buried.
Steve sat in a chair next to the table and he was about to drink a glass of water because there was no milk that day. And then he “pushed”. He saw it all clear.
Bitch, you had always been a bitch. You disgust me.
He had heard it like if it was whispered to his ear. Every word sounded clear and without hesitation. She had entered the house. His cranky aunt. After all of this, he didn’t hear anything else. Everything was quiet, his mother washing the dishes from the night before and his aunt sitting like a magpie in the other side of the table.
But he had heard it. He just needed to “push” and that act consisted in concentrating little by little and feeling like energy came out of your head in the shape of a tingling and heat. A little bit of wrinkles in the forehead and the eyes fixed on her. This time, it’ll be his aunt. He’ll later try it on someone else.
¿What about Cassandra?
He’ll try it and, of course, he did it as soon as he could. But when the time came, it didn’t work out. He pushed certain energies he thought he had. That sensation of “pushing” with his forehead a little frowned and the little tingling. Something came out of his forehead. But it didn’t work.
Not this time.
13
In the end, it turned out that Cassandra wasn’t a real threat to Steve. She kept attending classes at school and remained quiet to the mockery of the others. Except in the reoccurring nightmares, and it always ended the same, with the class burning by the four sides. Cassandra wasn’t a threat to the other either and she only hid her face. Weeks passed by and she didn’t move a thing, except for her pencil that fell to the floor, rolling over the desk. There was no “push”. And more weeks passed like regularly and everything kept his course. Winter gave his last hits before saying good bye for another year. Time was the same. Nothing happened.
And everything went by as regular, until the end of February, when he had another visitor.
14
‘Ben? Are you there?’
‘Of course, brother. I’ve always been by your side.’
‘Nothing strange has happened, brother. Except for the nightmares.’
‘That’s because it hasn’t come to the end. Be patience.’
‘The e... end?’ he stuttered a little.
‘Did you read the novel?’
‘Sure’
‘If you check the local news, you’ll see that it really happened. You must pay more attention. Cassandra is nothing more than a mirror. She doesn’t exist’
Steve sat up in his bed, as an impulse. The sheets fell to his hips.
‘You mean to say that the fat girl I see every day at school doesn’t exist? That she’s not there?’
Ben, hidden in the shadows, nodded. A puffy body about to explode out of every angle showed a purple skin, part of his teeth and an empty eye socket. His eye had fallen off and who knows where.
Steve wrinkled his nose. The roomed stank. Ben stank.
‘Exactly!’ said Ben’s shadow.
‘No. It can’t be. I see her every day, she’s real. Everyone in class messes with her, which means they can see her and she is always there,’ explained Steve a little upset.
‘Things aren’t what they seem.’
There was a silence, a long silence that felt like a buzzing in the ear above all. And the room stank, an unbearable foul smell. Steve breathed slowly just to not inhale all that smell.
‘You can make a new
thing, don’t you?’ asked Ben who casted a shadow thanks to the little light that came in from the window. It was almost a full moon.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know.’
Ben’s puffy shadow now became thin. Steve could see some holes in his head that showed his skull in several areas. But he didn’t mind.
‘Well. Sometimes, I can know what people are thinking.’
‘That’s what I meant.’
Steve relaxed a little more, amazed at times, confused at others. Could that be a nightmare? No. The smell was real.
Ben’s body turned around and walked heavily towards the door. He went through it just like that. But he was real.
On the next day, Steve saw some greenish spots on the door and on the floor. Ben was there, just like the first time. Did his mind collapsed? Maybe not. ¿Was he delirious? No, maybe not. Was he going crazy? No, neither that. Post-traumatic stress? Maybe not. Was he having delirious ideas after reading those stories from the box? Maybe not. Maybe always. And life went on. Just like that.
Or maybe not.
15
Spring came and Cassandra was still there. Always quiet, scared. Steve sensed some of the impulses of some of the bullies of the class. There were impulses and crazy ideas. He listened to them clearly, although no one moved their lips. But nothing happened. He didn’t even have nightmares, for the moment, at least. Ben didn’t visit him either for some time and Steve read all the stories in the box in the warmer nights of the spring, until the school year ended and with it, summer arrived.
And then, the doubts came back.
Besides, there was a job to do: dig a hole in the local graveyard alongside his friend John. Apparently, they were expecting a very special coffin because of the abnormal size of the hole.
Stephen King's Box Page 2