The Box (part 11)
Mrs. Gurt was not anywhere near the cube, as her husband feared.
But she was looking at it…or, through it sort of.
She stared into the hole in the wall of the Tonic Woman’s home and her senses couldn’t make logical sense of what was happening. As she stared into the wall hole, she saw what appeared to be the inside of the cube, but it went off in six directions, like six different worlds that she saw and experienced all at once. She did not just see in one direction, as all humans do. Instead, it was as if she could see in all six directions simultaneously, as if all six sides of the cube led into different parts of The Dimension.
This must be how flies see, with their hundred eyes, she thought to herself as her reverie began.
In one direction was a roaring flame. In another was a silent and infinite number of stars, drifting forever. There was an extraterrestrial planet and buildings unlike anything she’d seen before. She saw a child floating through space and was immediately convinced that it was one of the children who had gone missing from Crumb Hill years before.
Two of the walls of the cube were simply solid colors she had never seen before, like a cloud or a solid wall of fog filled the void.
In another direction was the yellow, idyllic fields Bailee had seen, with a cow lying peacefully beneath a clump of trees.
One direction looked like a sleek black maze of cubic directions and ledges and terribly high walls. She saw a beast wandering in the pit of one of these massive, dark vaults.
The last way seemed to be a world where everything was made of paper; everything was paper thin, and made of small, shaded brown paper-thin squares. There were simply layers and layers of two-dimensional trees and paths and beasts and everything, but it was all paper thin. She saw a bird fly by and at one point, when it flew by her at just the right angle, it was just a thin line. She saw a woman carrying a little boy to the edge of a cliff.
Officer Gurt was out of breath when he made it to the school’s front lawn. He didn’t see his wife, so he frantically looked around the building and the cube, then ran around the building again. The exhaustion from the cases had really taken its toll on his mental state.
His second time around the building, he came back to the cube, looking for any trace of his wife. He called out her name, but there was no response. He didn’t know if he should feel relieved or more afraid that she wasn’t here either. Had the cube sucked her in too?
He dropped onto the grass a few feet from the cube to catch his breath.
Mrs. Gurt’s senses became overloaded and she pulled her head back from the wall hole.
“What is that??” she exclaimed. “Is that The Dimension?”
“Oh, yes,” replied the Tonic Woman. “Well, parts of it. The Dimension cannot be fully comprehended or explained. And everyone experiences it differently. If you went into it, your experience would be unlike any of those!”
Mrs. Gurt was still confused as to why the old woman looked so scary and esoteric, yet spoke with such a joyful lightness. It threw her off.
“So are the missing people in there?” she asked.
“Oh, yes! You saw them all.”
“I did?? The girl floating through space looked nothing like Little Bailee Nuckles, and she had both her feet!”
“You’re right! That was not Bailee. But as for the others, remember that things change in The Dimension.”
“So, can we bring them back? Principal Hairbear, Bailee, and Little Timmy Shugger?”
The old woman thought about this while chewing on another seashell from the necklace. “It won’t be easy…but we can.”
But she was wrong.
Little Timmy fell into the blackness for a long time.
After what seemed like hours of falling through blackness — or was it minutes? — he hit the bottom. It was painless.
His thin body lay completely flat on a dark surface, but he could not move. He tried to move an arm, or even a finger, and not a thing budged. It was like he was being held down by a monstrous weight pressing down on him, though it didn’t hurt.
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