The Box (part 8)
Little Timmy Shugger also woke up in The Dimension.
He had been asleep with his brain wrapped in a dark brown sort of fog, and now he awoke and felt different. His eyes blinked open into a new sort of world. Everything he could see was made up of tiny squares. They were all two-dimensional, like multicolored pieces of paper.
Everything was various shades of brown, as they were in Crumb Hill, but the world was nothing but paper-thin squares. He looked down at his own body and found that he, too, had become so thin that he couldn’t even see his arm if he turned it to the side.
But nothing twisted or moved organically; it was all operating on 90-degree angles. His thin hands looked like a hundred little squares running around and moving across his skin as he moved them and the light changed. Darker squares meant shadows, and where the light hit them, were lighter squares.
Timmy had never seen anything like it. He looked around himself again and saw the trees and bushes and grasses were all very thin drawings, made of hundreds of squares. The squares were alive, animating everything he could see. If he walked past a tree, it would get thinner and then disappear when he was next to it, like looking down a piece of paper from the side.
None of it made sense to Little Timmy’s little brain.
The last thing he remembered before he woke up was the black cube in front of his school. He had rushed out of his tutoring session, but paused when he saw the new addition to the front lawn. Timmy was almost positive this hadn’t been there earlier in the day, as he stared out the window of his classroom in boredom.
He had done a lap around the cube, examining its dark black exterior in curiosity. The last thing Timmy remembered was getting close to it and looking in detail at the smooth, hard surface. The blackness of the cube’s wall morphed into a brown haze, and it was from this haze that he woke up into this strange new world, where everything was paper thin and made of squares.
He continued adjusting to this weird reality. The sounds were different in The Dimension too. Every step he took made a sharp little pit sound, like a shovel hitting hard soil. The wind in the thin trees sounded like it was being blown through a long tube.
Then he made out a different sound blending with the wind: a high, pitchy howl. It sounded like a coyote, or someone crying, if they were on the other end of a long-distance telephone line.
Pit. Pit. Pit.
He kept making his way through the woods, and heard the sound again. Timmy started to run.
Pitpitpitpitpit.
The paper-thin world revealed itself to him in layers, like running past flat sheets of paper as he ran forward. Then, from the film of papery fog in front of him, emerged a towering shadow, twice his height. She moaned again, louder this time, as he was standing feet from her, and Little Timmy Shugger realized he was standing feet from a very tall woman.
Through the strange, cubic fog of The Dimension’s air, she seemed to turn and look at him.
Back in Crumb Hill, Officer Gurt was getting worn out. He couldn’t wrap his mind around what was happening, where the people had gone, or where the cube had come from.
Of course, The Dimension was on his mind. Everyone in Crumb Hill had their own theories and legends about it. People told stories about The Dimension all the time. It was common knowledge that you couldn’t get back from it once you went, but that didn’t stop people from claiming to have visited and returned. Everyone had their own rendition of what it was like, and none of them lined up.
There were plenty of entrances to The Dimension around, but none of them looked like this. They had always looked like dark holes to another world, like the vortex made in water as it slithers down a drain. And they didn’t last very long. An entrance would open, maybe one or two people would fall into it, and a week later it would close.
How would this solid object with five solid sides (he assumed the bottom was also solid, but had no way of knowing for sure, and as a police officer, guessing is not in the job description), lead anyone to The Dimension?
The cube clearly had something to do with the disappearances, and little Hilly’s feet lying next to it were now proof. The question was, did any of it have to do with The Dimension or not? And if not, then where in the world did this cube come from? There was no other explanation.
Mrs. Gurt had noticed the wear these cases were having on her husband, and she wanted to help. She wanted her husband back — he had been so preoccupied with work lately that he had barely been home, except to sleep!
She had considered consulting the Tonic Woman who lived on the outskirts of Crumb Hill for help. Many considered her to be a witch, but others claimed she had saved their lives. Some said she made animals aware of their own deaths, while other people claimed that she had cleansed them of their dandruff. There were half as many rumors about her as there were about The Dimension — and that’s a lot!
So the day after little Hilly was removed from her feet, Mrs. Gurt set out to see the Tonic Woman.
Bailee was having fun hopping around the field on her hooves. She could jump higher and farther than she ever could back in Crumb Hill. She was making her way to the crop of trees on the horizon, but would jump to the side and zigzag and then jump backwards, then forward again.
She kept making her way to the trees and having fun doing it.
Bailee didn’t know how long it took for her to reach them, but she eventually got to the trees and was grateful for the shade. The air in The Dimension wasn’t too hot — just a pleasant, yellow warmth — but hopping around so much had made her work up a sweat.
She hoped there would be some water in the trees and to her delight, there was a little stream there in the middle of them, the trees gathered around it. She was so hot and thirsty, she dropped to all fours to drink straight from the ravine. But when she did, she noticed that he hands were also darker than before. They hit the ground on the bank of the stream and felt nothing.
Bailee expected her fingers to feel the grass and soil beneath them, but instead, it felt the same as her hooved feet did when she was hopping around — there was no sensation, except the setting down of her weigh on her limbs. And as she looked at her hands, she found that they were no longer hands at all, but also black hooves.
Her arms still had some skin, but as she watched, she saw fur growing out of it before her eyes. Her skin was being quickly hidden by this whitish fur.
She shook her head, and with it, shook concerns about her taxonomic state from her mind. Bailee snorted and bent down to lap up some water.
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Day 66 of 100 Days of Blog
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