The Box: Uncanny Stories Read online

  “Shock,” murmured Poulter and the sheriff nodded grimly.

  They tried to put him down on the cab seat, a blanket over him but he kept sitting up, never speaking. The coffee Wheeler tried to give him dribbled from his lips and across his chin. The two men stood beside the truck while Paal stared through the windshield at the burning house.

  “Bad off,” said Poulter. “Can’t talk, cry, nor nothing.”

  “He isn’t burned,” Wheeler said, perplexed. “How’d he get out of the house without getting burned?”

  “Maybe his folks got out, too,” said Poulter.

  “Where are they then?”

  The older man shook his head. “Dunno, Harry.”

  “Well, I better take him home to Cora,” the sheriff said. “Can’t leave him sitting out here.”

  “Think I’d better go with you,” Poulter said. “I have t’get the mail sorted for delivery.”

  “All right.”

  Wheeler told the other four men he’d bring back food and replacements in an hour or so. Then Poulter and he climbed into the cab beside Paal and he jabbed his boot toe on the starter. The engine coughed spasmodically, groaned over, then caught. The sheriff raced it until it was warm, then eased it into gear. The truck rolled off slowly down the dirt road that led to the highway.

  Until the burning house was no longer visible, Paal stared out the back window, face still immobile. Then, slowly, he turned, the blanket slipping off his thin shoulders. Tom Poulter put it back over him.

  “Warm enough?” he asked.

  The silent boy looked at Poulter as if he’d never heard a human voice in his life.

  As soon as she heard the truck turn off the road, Cora Wheeler’s quick right hand moved along the stove-front switches. Before her husband’s bootfalls sounded on the back porch steps, the bacon lay neatly in strips across the frying pan, white moons of pancake batter were browning on the griddle, and the already-brewed coffee was heating.

  “Harry.”

  There was a sound of pitying distress in her voice as she saw the boy in his arms. She hurried across the kitchen.

  “Let’s get him to bed,” Wheeler said. “I think maybe he’s in shock.”

  The slender woman moved up the stairs on hurried feet, threw open the door of what had been David’s room, and moved to the bed. When Wheeler passed through the doorway she had the covers peeled back and was plugging in an electric blanket.

  “Is he hurt?” she asked.

  “No.” He put Paal down on the bed.

  “Poor darling,” she murmured, tucking in the bed-clothes around the boy’s frail body. “Poor little darling.” She stroked back the soft blond hair from his forehead and smiled down at him.

  “There now, go to sleep, dear. It’s all right. Go to sleep.”

  Wheeler stood behind her and saw the seven-year-old boy staring up at Cora with that same dazed, lifeless expression. It hadn’t changed once since Tom Poulter had brought him out of the woods.

  The sheriff turned and went down to the kitchen. There he phoned for replacements, then turned the pancakes and bacon, and poured himself a cup of coffee. He was drinking it when Cora came down the back stairs and returned to the stove.

  “Are his parents—?” she began.

  “I don’t know,” Wheeler said, shaking his head. “We couldn’t get near the house.”

  “But the boy—?”

  “Tom Poulter found him outside.”

  “Outside.”

  “We don’t know how he got out,” he said. “All we know’s he was there.”

  His wife grew silent. She slid pancakes on a dish and put the dish in front of him. She put her hand on his shoulder.

  “You look tired,” she said. “Can you go to bed?”

  “Later,” he said.

  She nodded, then, patting his shoulder, turned away. “The bacon will be done directly,” she said.

  He grunted. Then, as he poured maple syrup over the stack of cakes, he said, “I expect they are dead, Cora. It’s an awful fire; still going when I left. Nothing we could do about it.”

  “That poor boy,” she said.

  She stood by the stove watching her husband eat wearily.

  “I tried to get him to talk,” she said, shaking her head, “but he never said a word.”

  “Never said a word to us either,” he told her, “just stared.”

  He looked at the table, chewing thoughtfully.

  “Like he doesn’t even know how to talk,” he said.

  A little after ten that morning the waterfall came—a waterfall of rain—and the burning house sputtered and hissed into charred, smoke-fogged ruins.

  Red-eyed and exhausted, Sheriff Wheeler sat motionless in the truck cab until the deluge had slackened. Then, with a chest-deep groan, he pushed open the door and slid to the ground. There, he raised the collar of his slicker and pulled down the wide-brimmed Stetson more tightly on his skull. He walked around to the back of the covered truck.

  “Come on,” he said, his voice hoarsely dry. He trudged through the clinging mud towards the house.

  The front door still stood. Wheeler and the other men bypassed it and clambered over the collapsed living room wall. The sheriff felt thin waves of heat from the still-glowing timbers and the throat-clogging reek of wet, smoldering rugs and upholstery turned his edgy stomach.

  He stepped across some half-burned books on the floor and the roasted bindings crackled beneath his tread. He kept moving, into the hall, breathing through gritted teeth, rain spattering off his shoulders and back. I hope they got out, he thought, I hope to God they got out.

  They hadn’t. They were still in their bed, no longer human, blackened to a hideous, joint-twisted crisp. Sheriff Wheeler’s face was taut and pale as he looked down at them.

  One of the men prodded a wet twig at something on the mattress.

  “Pipe,” Wheeler heard him say above the drum of rain. “Must have fell asleep smokin’.”

  “Get some blankets,” Wheeler told them. “Put them in the back of the truck.”

  Two of the men turned away without a word and Wheeler heard them clump away over the rubble.

  He was unable to take his eyes off Professor Holger Nielsen and his wife Fanny, scorched into grotesque mockeries of the handsome couple he remembered—the tall, big-framed Holger, calmly imperious; the slender, auburn-haired Fanny, her face a soft, rose-cheeked—

  Abruptly, the sheriff turned and stumped from the room, almost tripping over a fallen beam.

  The boy—what would happen to the boy now? That day was the first time Paal had ever left this house in his life. His parents were the fulcrum of his world; Wheeler knew that much. No wonder there had been that look of shocked incomprehension on Paal’s face.

  Yet how did he know his mother and father were dead?

  As the sheriff crossed the living room, he saw one of the men looking at a partially charred book.

  “Look at this,” the man said, holding it out.

  Wheeler glanced at it, his eyes catching the title: The Unknown Mind.

  He turned away tensely. “Put it down!” he snapped, quitting the house with long, anxious strides. The memory of how the Nielsens looked went with him; and something else. A question.

  How did Paal get out of the house?

  Paal woke up.

  For a long moment he stared up at the formless shadows that danced and fluttered across the ceiling. It was raining out. The wind was rustling tree boughs outside the window, causing shadow movements in this strange room. Paal lay motionless in the warm center of the bed, air crisp in his lungs, cold against his pale cheeks.

  Where were they? Paal closed his eyes and tried to sense their presence. They weren’t in the house. Where then? Where were his mother and father?

  Hands of my mother. Paal washed his mind clean of all but the trigger symbol. They rested on the ebony velvet of his concentration—pale, lovely hands, soft to touch and be touched by, the mechanism that could raise his mi
nd to the needed level of clarity.

  In his own home it would be unnecessary. His own home was filled with the sense of them. Each object touched by them possessed a power to bring their minds close. The very air seemed charged with their consciousness, filled with a constancy of attention.

  Not here. He needed to lift himself above the alien drag of here.

  Therefore, I am convinced that each child is born with this instinctive ability. Words given to him by his father appearing again like dew-jewelled spiderweb across the fingers of his mother’s hands. He stripped it off. The hands were free again, stroking slowly at the darkness of his mental focus. His eyes were shut; a tracery of lines and ridges scarred his brow, his tightened jaw was bloodless. The level of awareness, like waters, rose.

  His senses rose along, unbidden.

  Sound revealed its woven maze—the rushing, thudding, drumming, dripping rain; the tangled knit of winds through air and tree and gabled eave; the crackling settle of the house; each whispering transience of process.

  Sense of smell expanded to a cloud of brain-filling odors—wood and wool, damp brick and dust and sweet starched linens. Beneath his tensing fingers weave became apparent—coolness and warmth, the weight of covers, the delicate, skin-scarring press of rumpled sheet. In his mouth the taste of cold air, old house. Of sight, only the hands.

  Silence; lack of response. He’d never had to wait so long for answers before. Usually, they flooded on him easily. His mother’s hands grew clearer. They pulsed with life. Unknown, he climbed beyond. This bottom level sets the stage for more important phenomena. Words of his father. He’d never gone above that bottom level until now.

  Up, up. Like cool hands drawing him to rarified heights. Tendrils of acute consciousness rose towards the peak, searching desperately for a holding place. The hands began breaking into clouds. The clouds dispersed.

  It seemed he floated towards the blackened tangle of his home, rain a glistening lace before his eyes. He saw the front door standing, waiting for his hand. The house drew closer. It was engulfed in licking mists. Closer, closer—

  Paal, no.

  His body shuddered on the bed. Ice frosted his brain. The house fled suddenly, bearing with itself a horrid image of two black figures lying on—

  Paal jolted up, staring and rigid. Awareness maelstromed into its hiding place. One thing alone remained. He knew that they were gone. He knew that they had guided him, sleeping, from the house.

  Even as they burned.

  That night they knew he couldn’t speak.

  There was no reason for it, they thought. His tongue was there, his throat looked healthy. Wheeler looked into his opened mouth and saw that. But Paal did not speak.

  “So that’s what it was,” the sheriff said, shaking his head gravely. It was near eleven. Paal was asleep again.

  “What’s that, Harry?” asked Cora, brushing her dark blond hair in front of the dressing table mirror.

  “Those times when Miss Frank and I tried to get the Nielsens to start the boy in school.” He hung his pants across the chair back. “The answer was always no. Now I see why.”

  She glanced up at his reflection. “There must be something wrong with him, Harry,” she said.

  “Well, we can have Doc Steiger look at him but I don’t think so.”

  “But they were college people,” she argued. “There was no earthly reason why they shouldn’t teach him how to talk. Unless there was some reason he couldn’t.”

  Wheeler shook his head again.

  “They were strange people, Cora,” he said. “Hardly spoke a word themselves. As if they were too good for talking—or something.” He grunted disgustedly. “No wonder they didn’t want that boy to school.”

  He sank down on the bed with a groan and shucked off boots and calf-high stockings. “What a day,” he muttered.

  “You didn’t find anything at the house?”

  “Nothing. No identification papers at all. The house is burned to a cinder. Nothing but a pile of books and they don’t lead us anywhere.”

  “Isn’t there any way?”

  “The Nielsens never had a charge account in town. And they weren’t even citizens so the professor wasn’t registered for the draft.”

  “Oh.” Cora looked a moment at her face reflected in the oval mirror. Then her gaze lowered to the photograph on the dressing table—David as he was when he was nine. The Nielsen boy looked a great deal like David, she thought. Same height and build. Maybe David’s hair had been a trifle darker but—

  “What’s to be done with him?” she asked.

  “Couldn’t say, Cora,” he answered. “We have to wait till the end of the month, I guess. Tom Poulter says the Nielsens got three letters the end of every month. Come from Europe, he said. We’ll just have to wait for them, then write back to the addresses on them. May be the boy has relations over there.”

  “Europe,” she said, almost to herself. “That far away.”

  Her husband grunted, then pulled the covers back and sank down heavily on the mattress.

  “Tired,” he muttered.

  He stared at the ceiling. “Come to bed,” he said.

  “In a little while.”

  She sat there brushing distractedly at her hair until the sound of his snoring broke the silence. Then, quietly, she rose and moved across the hall.

  There was a river of moonlight across the bed. It flowed over Paal’s small, motionless hands. Cora stood in the shadows a long time looking at the hands. For a moment she thought it was David in his bed again.

  It was the sound.

  Like endless club strokes across his vivid mind, it pulsed and throbbed into him in an endless, garbled din. He sensed it was communication of a sort but it hurt his ears and chained awareness and locked incoming thoughts behind dense, impassable walls.

  Sometimes, in an infrequent moment of silence he would sense a fissure in the walls and, for that fleeting moment, catch hold of fragments—like an animal snatching scraps of food before the trap jaws clash together.

  But then the sound would start again, rising and falling in rhythmless beat, jarring and grating, rubbing at the live, glistening surface of comprehension until it was dry and aching and confused.

  “Paal,” she said.

  A week had passed; another week would pass before the letters came.

  “Paal, didn’t they ever talk to you? Paal?”

  Fists striking at delicate acuteness. Hands squeezing sensitivity from the vibrant ganglia of his mind.

  “Paal, don’t you know your name? Paal? Paal.”

  There was nothing physically wrong with him. Doctor Steiger had made sure of it. There was no reason for him not to talk.

  “We’ll teach you, Paal. It’s all right, darling. We’ll teach you.” Like knife strokes across the weave of consciousness. “Paal. Paal.”

  Paal. It was himself; he sensed that much. But it was different in the ears, a dead, depressive sound standing alone and drab, without the host of linked associations that existed in his mind. In thought, his name was more than letters. It was him, every facet of his person and its meaning to himself, his mother and his father, to his life. When they had summoned him or thought his name it had been more than just the small hard core which sound made of it. It had been everything interwoven in a flash of knowing, unhampered by sound.

  “Paal, don’t you understand? It’s your name. Paal Nielsen. Don’t you understand?”

  Drumming, pounding at raw sensitivity. Paal. The sound kicking at him. Paal. Paal. Trying to dislodge his grip and fling him into the maw of sound.

  “Paal. Try, Paal. Say it after me. Pa-al. Pa-al.”

  Twisting away, he would run from her in panic and she would follow him to where he cowered by the bed of her son.

  Then, for long moments, there would be peace. She would hold him in her arms and, as if she understood, would not speak. There would be stillness and no pounding clash of sound against his mind. She would stroke his hair and kiss aw
ay sobless tears. He would lie against the warmth of her, his mind, like a timid animal, emerging from its hiding place again—to sense a flow of understanding from this woman. Feeling that needed no sound.

  Love—wordless, unencumbered, and beautiful.

  Sheriff Wheeler was just leaving the house that morning when the phone rang. He stood in the front hallway, waiting until Cora picked it up.

  “Harry!” he heard her call. “Are you gone yet?”

  He came back into the kitchen and took the receiver from her. “Wheeler,” he said into it.

  “Tom Poulter, Harry,” the postmaster said. “Them letters is in.”

  “Be right there,” Wheeler said and hung up.

  “The letters?” his wife asked.

  Wheeler nodded.

  “Oh,” she murmured so that he barely heard her.

  When Wheeler entered the post office twenty minutes later, Poulter slid the three letters across the counter. The sheriff picked them up.

  “Switzerland,” he read the postmarks, “Sweden, Germany.”

  “That’s the lot,” Poulter said, “like always. On the thirtieth of the month.”

  “Can’t open them, I suppose,” Wheeler said.

  “Y’know I’d say yes if I could, Harry,” Poulter answered. “But law’s law. You know that. I got t’send them back unopened. That’s the law.”

  “All right.” Wheeler took out his pen and copied down the return addresses in his pad. He pushed the letters back. “Thanks.”

  When he got home at four that afternoon, Cora was in the front room with Paal. There was a look of confused emotion on Paal’s face—a desire to please coupled with a frightened need to flee the disconcertion of sound. He sat beside her on the couch looking as if he were about to cry.

  “Oh, Paal,” she said as Wheeler entered. She put her arms around the trembling boy. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, darling.”

  She saw her husband.

  “What did they do to him?” she asked, unhappily.

  He shook his head. “Don’t know,” he said. “He should have been put in school though.”