The Box (part 12 – final part!)
Throwback to the Great Crumb Wars.“I’m going to have to whisper,” said the Tonic Woman. This sentence alone sent shivers down the spine of Mrs. Gurt. Whispering had been outlawed in Crumb Hill since long before the Great Crumb Wars, and everyone knew why: You’d either summon beasts from The Dimension, get sent into it, or something worse altogether.
“You…you are?” asked Mrs. Gurt. “Is there no other way?”
“Unfortunately not. But don’t worry! If I do it correctly, nothing will go wrong! I’ve done this a number of times before. And that number is four. And only one of those times was dangerous.”
“Alright, so what will we have to do?”
The old woman walked over to a chest in the corner of the room and began rummaging through it. She pulled out a long thread and then cut it into three arm-length strands. The Tonic Woman tied each one above windows on three walls of the room — one faced east, one west, and one north.
“So,” she began to explain, “now we wait. The wind will tell us when the time is right. Once all three threads are blowing in, that means that the three winds are allowing us to whisper the names of the departed.”
Mrs. Gurt thought the old woman was crazy. Of course, wind can only blow in one direction, so one or two would blow in and the others would blow out.
Ten minutes later, a breeze blew from the east, but the western thread flapped out the window.
The Tonic Woman looked at Mrs. Gurt and smiled. She could tell that the younger woman thought she was crazy, and said, “Patience.”
It was almost an hour before all three threads were blowing in from their respective windows. A steady breeze came from three directions, blowing all three strings in to about a 45 degree angle between the ceiling and the wall.
“It’s time!” The older woman hopped up and hurried over to the wall hole. She put her face into it, and Mrs. Gurt barely heard her whisper into it.
“Little Timmy Shugger,” she clearly annunciated through a whisper into the hole, with her face pressed all the way into it. “Principal Bearhair. Little Bailee Nuckles.”
She then pulled her face out of the hole and immediately the wind died down. Mrs. Gurt had been tense the entire time, expecting something terrible to come from the whispering. She waited, and looked around, out the windows, watching for a monster. But nothing came. She allowed her body to relax and she finally inhaled.
“It worked?” she asked the Tonic Woman.
“I think so,” said the older woman, taking another bite of seashell.
“Well, that was easy.”
“Yup, sometimes I’m wrong about things!” replied the Tonic Woman with bits of seashell sputtering from her lips.
After thanking her for her time, Mrs. Gurt walked back to town. She realized it had gotten late and her husband may be worried about her.
But after arriving at their home and finding it empty, she decided to walk to the school, out of curiosity.
The sun was dropping beneath the horizon as Officer Gurt sat next to the cube. Suddenly, he heard moaning coming from it. He hopped up to his feet and ran to it, then around it.
“Hello??” he yelled at the smooth walls of the black box.
The moaning continued. It sounded like it was coming from under the thing. Officer Gurt ran around to the side where the dynamite had blown a hole in the ground beneath it. He began pulling dirt out from under it with his hands.
The cries sounded like a child stuck under the cube.
“Hello?” he yelled again while pulling out clumps of dirt. “I’ll get you out!”
Officer Gurt heard footsteps behind him as he was digging, his face down in the hole. Without turning to look, he yelled, “Hey! Get help! Or help me dig! I think someone is under the cube!”
When there was no response, Officer Gurt looked over his shoulder and saw a cow standing near him, eating some grass from the lawn. He was so jarred that he paused and stared at it for a moment.
Must have escaped from someone’s farm.
He turned back and continued digging.
Half an hour later, his wife approached the school and found her husband halfway beneath the cube, his legs sticking out into the hole. A cow was chewing on the lawn some thirty feet from the cube.
“Honey?” she said as she approached. “Is that you?”
“Just….about…” he said from beneath the box, out of breath. “Got it!”
She watched as his feet scooted backward out from under the box and he emerged from the hole. Then Mrs. Gurt was shocked to see a child-sized piece of paper follow him out of the hole. It was the size of a little boy, like a moving, living sheet. It was paper thin, but moved like a kid.
When it turned to face her and she could see it fully from the front, she exclaimed, “Little Timmy Shugger!”
A week later, Bailee still had not been found.
After digging Little Timmy out from under the cube, they had discovered a bunch of chewed up pieces of someone lying nearby. Since people don’t die in Crumb Hill — they just go to The Dimension when they’re too old to shovel— the bits of the person were still alive. After some investigation, the police determined the mushy pieces were Principal Bearhair.
Doctors are still trying to piece him back together, but they have made one thing clear: “Don’t expect him to dance a Jittercrumb anytime soon; his spleen and left tibia would slide right out.”
No one knew who the cow belonged to. No farmers were missing any of theirs, so the residents of Crumb Hill just let her wander freely around the town, and she quickly became a sort of well-known fixture around the town. The people began to affectionately refer to her as Bailee, since she had mysteriously appeared the same way Little Bailey had mysteriously disappeared.
Little Timmy never went back to his normal dimensions. He is still two-dimensional, and doctors think that he may always be. They have to use hammers to smash his food down to a digestible proportion and then slide the thin food into his mouth.
And the cube disappeared the day after Little Timmy returned. There was a square patch of yellow grass in front of the school next to a big hole in the earth. It was determined that it was simply the most unique entrance to The Dimension that had opened in the town yet, and they’d be more careful with mysterious objects in the future.
the end
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Day 71 of 100 Days of Blog
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