The Box (part 7)

Officer Gurt was getting tired of responding to emergency calls. Not because they weren’t real emergencies, but because they were. The folks of Crumb Hill were accustomed to weird things happening, but when they got hit, they got hit hard. And three disappearances in one week was rough.

He now stood in the school building again, talking to Miss Yarris and Little Hilly Bildagard. He had gotten there before her parents, or any other authorities, and was listening to the story through Hilly’s sobs.

“…and j-just her shoes and f-feet were there,” concluded Hilly.

“I see,” he replied. “Thank you for sharing that with me. I’m going to go look at the cube again, can you stay here with Miss Yarris and just try to breathe?”

He walked to the cube once again and just as Hilly had said, found the feet lying near the box. He bent down to look at them and it was just as the girl had said. There were two little girl’s shoes, with feet inside of them. It looked like a clean cut at the ankles, both at similar, yet slightly different angles.

Officer Gurt looked at the box and still noticed nothing different about it. It looked solid and dead as ever. It just sat there. He wracked his brain trying to piece together Principal Bearhair’s pen, and these shoes, and Little Timmy Shugger, and how they all fit together. Or were they not connected at all? He made a few more notes in his pad.

Bailee stared at her ankles as the ends of her legs formed into hooves before her eyes. As she watched the rapid growth of the appendages before her eyes, she did not feel horrified. Instead, she felt an intense sort of curiosity. Perhaps being in this new world had calmed many of her fears and made her feel at peace for the first time in a long time.

The hooves came together and nearly met in the front, leaving a split in the middle. She moved her legs around once the hooves seemed to be done growing, watching her new feet in fascination. Bailee then stood up and jumped around. To her delight, her hooves propelled her further and higher than her feet ever did.

She even found herself giggling as she thrust herself up and through the air. Bailee bounded around and eventually made her way to the nearest cluster of trees, where she would eventually pass away.

Principal Hairbear continued lowering down the vertical wall of the ledge. Minutes had passed and he couldn’t tell how far down the side he had gone. It was so dark that he couldn’t see the top where he had come from, or the ground below him. He simply hung down from the vines which grew from his wrist and let them slowly lower them downward.

He swung the lantern out to the left, then the right, and hoped to see anything. It was just darkness. The yellow glow from his lantern reached out into the black and came back to his eyes empty.

Mr. Bearhair called out again, “Timmy! Are you down there?”

A moment later, the same small voice answered him from far below in the abyss, “Help me!”

He heard the scratching sound again.

It felt like 30 minutes had passed, but it could have been an hour. At last, a floor appeared ten feet beneath Mr. Bearhair’s feet.

Then eight feet.

Five

Then his dangling feet slowly came into contact with the floor of the same black color and smooth texture as everything else in The Dimension. Once her could stand up, Mr. Hairbear yelled out again, “Ok, Timmy! I’m here! Where are you?”

“I’m here, help!” responded the voice, but now it seemed to come from above him, maybe ten feet above his head. Mr. Hairbear figured Timmy was trapped on a ledge somewhere up ahead.

The air had changed down here, and he just now noticed the thickness of it, that the air down here was tinged with a foul, rotten scent. He held the lantern up and took a step forward.

He realized that the scent was terrible, and getting worse as he moved forward. He knew Timmy was ahead of him now, and could hear him moving just several yards in front of him.

“Timmy! Where are you?”

“I’m here!”

Now the voice was just beyond the flickering light of his lantern.

Two steps later, Mr. Bearhair saw it.

He saw the claw-like tentacles rising up dozens of feet from the smooth black floor. They were hairy with terrible scum and dandruff falling from them. He suddenly heard the breathing too.

There was no wall or ledge in front of him.

There was no Timmy.

Mr. Bearhair’s eyes slowly moved up the tentacles to the grotesque face of The Dimension Beast. He could now hear the raspy breath and couldn’t look away from the dead white eyes.