The Box (part 3)

This part contains some bits that may be disturbing to some.
Read part 1 here!

It had been two days since the box appeared and little Timmy Shugger disappeared. The police had gotten nowhere in their search for him; it was as if he had left school and jumped into space without a trace.

Principal Bearhair was frustrated. Both of these events coincided with the school, so it was distracting students from their studies, police were crawling around which was stressing him out, and it was all a bad look on him. Early on the third morning after the cube appeared, he was walking into the school building when he happened to notice something different about the cube.

The day before, the police had tried to blow up the cube which left one side of it white and dusty (though perfectly intact), but out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that that side was no longer white.

He looked at it and noticed that it was black again. But he stared, he squinted his little eyes and it wasn’t just black. His pupils could be deceiving him, but it looked like the entire side of the black box was gone, and inside was an even deeper shade of black, like space. It wasn’t just a black-colored wall, but a void.

He walked across the lawn to the cube and squinted into the abyss. He stood a few feet away and gazed into it, making sure his eyes were not playing tricks. Principal Hairbear could not make sense of what he was looking at, even as he drew closer to the blackest of boxes and heard a faint scratching sound.

As usual, Miss Yarris was the second one to arrive at school, but this morning when she arrived, no one else was there. Principal Bearhair normally opened up the doors and would be tinkering away in his office when she arrived, but he wasn’t there now. Miss Yarris found her key and let herself in the back door.

Slowly the other teachers and staff showed up, but still no principal. It was unusual, and the teachers were murmuring about it to one another in the teacher’s lounge. Miss Yarris decided to pick up the lounge phone and call his wife, Mrs. Hairbear.

“Oh yes, he left the same time he always does!” she said through the phone line. Then the meaning behind the question hit her. “Why? …he’s not there yet?”

“No, ma’am,” said Miss Yarris.

A minute later she hung up. They thought that perhaps Mr. Bearhair was running errands or talking to the police again, and the day went on, though he never showed up to school that day.

According to some who have been there, The Dimension is kind of like a room in your grandmother’s house, where the ancient wallpaper is peeling at the corners where the horsehair plaster is crumbling.

It smells like porridge which has sat out for just a hair too long.

It is dark.

Most people who visit The Dimension don’t come back, and there are plenty of rumors floating around for why this is as well. Some say that you could return, but the madness of The Dimension sets in and you become too surrendered to fits to find the door which brought you there.

Others say that there are beasts worse than any seen in Crumb Hill which will devour, maim, torture, or otherwise keep you from leaving. They will not, however, kill you.

Other people reason that The Dimension is called that, exactly because you change dimensions. It’s indescribable. “Ineffable!” according to Terrence Dirk, who has claimed for decades that he went to The Dimension as a boy. Cumb Hill’s reporter had a chance to sit down with him and ask about the visit.

“I stumbled down a hole and found myself transformed.” Despite repeated inquisitions, Dirk has not revealed the location or nature of this hole.

“I cannot describe it to you. It would be like a three-dimensional being trying to explain our world to a two-dimensional stick figure. You simply cannot believe the transformation.

“I fell into the hole and found myself suddenly indoors. In a hallway of some sort. The doors on either side went on forever. The wallpaper smelled dank and was peeling. I went into the nearest door to me. And this, this is the part I always regret. I wish I had looked around more carefully to decide which door to go in. I think I could have picked a better door.

“I turned the knob and was in my childhood home. But it was different. Something was off. My mother was baking at the stovetop and I was the size of a toddler. I looked up at her, but she was different. Her skin was black as if she had been burnt to a crisp and it fell off in flakes. She turned from the stove toward me, and smiled, a big, rotten grin. Then, before I could even see her move, she had me off the ground and was trying to stuff me into the oven.”

When asked how he survived the oven, Dirk is coy with the details. It seems that the oven was yet another portal to another part of The Dimension.

“I felt the heat, but as I warmed up, my shell disintegrated. It wasn’t me who was burnt, but the shell which held me back from swimming in the universe’s ocean. You know what I mean?”

The reporter did not.

“After the shell burnt away and my crust fell off, I could see The Dimension for what it truly was. My eyes were opened. I looked upon it and–”

At this point in the interview, Terrence Dirk had a stroke which left him in the hospital, unable to speak. So she had to interview other folks who claimed to have visited The Dimension.

Little Jenny Burk’s adventure to The Dimension began in Crumb Hill’s only elevator, in the Crumb Hill Blank Brothers Building. Jenny, the youngest person to visit The Dimension and return with only one mouth, wandered away from her mother on the first floor and wound up in the elevator. She managed to slide the rusty gate shut behind her and press the button for the fifth floor.

The elevator rose like normal, and it was not until she exited the elevator at the fifth stop that she realized something was different. When she had boarded the elevator it was 10:04am.

Now it was night.

Streaks of light from the window painted lines across the floor and walls. The hustle and bustle of the lively morning had been replaced with a dead silence.

“I stepped off the lift and was really scared. I didn’t know where my mom was. I looked down the hallway and saw an old man, so I ran to him and asked for help. But he just stood there. It was like he didn’t know I was there, like he couldn’t see or hear me at all.”

Little Jenny said that she screamed and pleaded for the man to help her, but he walked very slowly down the hallway, completely immune to her presence, even after she tugged on his coat.

She eventually gave up and scurried back to the elevator, where there was now an old woman. Little Jenny asked her for help as well, but only received a blank stare out the open gate. She returned to the first floor and was back in Crumb Hill.

Our reporter thinks that Little Jenny simply went to the Crumb Hill Old Folks Facility (CHOFF) instead.

Regardless of the rumors, when Mr. Bearhair got his feet under him in the pitch blackness, he was sure he was inside The Dimension.

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Day 60 of 100 Days of Blog

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