Don't Open the Box

The package was there, waiting for me when I got home from the hospital.

My guts still hollowed out from sitting by my wife’s bedside, waiting for her to wake, her warning from years before playing on a continuous loop in my mind, and here it was - the box she told me I must never open.

“Promise me,” she said, her eyes sharp enough to pierce, to cut. Her grip tightened on my hands, and I felt my bones bend, my joints compress. God, she was strong.

“Promise me, if anything ever happens to me, and a package shows up where we live, that you will not open it.”

I’d paused then - it had seemed like the most ludicrous request ever at the time, years and years ago, the two of us draped over each other on the sagging couch in our first apartment, the sun streaming in from outside, creating a halo effect behind her head - but there was nothing angelic about the look she’d given, the seriousness of the request, how urgently she needed me to answer in the affirmative.

“Hun, but why - OW!” she bore down even harder on my hands, and I heard a hiss and then realized I was the one making the sound.

“Fine,” I said, and she released my hands, a smile quirking at the corner of her mouth.

“Good. Was that so hard?” and she went back to her book.

She’d never mentioned it again - not in two more years of dating, or two more years as a married couple, or in three years as parents. The memory had slipped from me, a quirky moment in a relationship full of them, but it came roaring back now as the box sat there like a greeting, an accusation, as if it already knew I could not resist opening it.

I peeked up from beneath my hood to see what looked like a bat flitting off through the sky - but that can’t be right. It must have been a drone.

I’d just come from my wife’s hospital bedside, where she lay in a coma following a car crash, too small and delicate, like a paper doll, hooked up to machines to breathe for her, to find a box on our front step, a box she warned me would come.

At a glance, just a normal cardboard box - until I realize there are no seams. No strips of packing tape. No address stickers, just our address stenciled on the side in gothic script; in the space for a return address is an inky black stamp of something that looks like a gargoyle - hunched back, reptilian wings, gaping mouth. My breath catches, and the sky really opens up, the rain coming down in great, cold sheets. I scoop up the box and head inside, the door clicking shut behind me.

I get our two daughters to bed.

I pour myself a drink.

I try to resist, but I can’t.

I break my promise to my comatose wife and open the box, slicing the top with a straight razor.

Inside, wrapped in brown paper, is a small black figurine, similar to the gargoyle stamped on the box, surprisingly heavy, like obsidian, but without the shine - it’s like it absorbs the light.

As soon as I look this small figure full in the face, I hear shrieking from upstairs - the girls - something is hurting our girls. I turn to run for them, but before I can, the glass sliding door to the deck explodes inward in a shower of glass shards, and there she is.

Pale, wet hospital gown clinging to a body utterly transformed - where my slender, graceful wife should be standing is a creature, bent, gray-skinned, huge, lantern-like eyes leering from a crooked face.

In a voice that sounds like hers layered a thousand times over, she says, “I told you not to open it.”

I hear a screech from behind me, and when I look, our girls are at the bottom of the stairs, also transformed, their footie pajamas ripped open to reveal taloned feet, the blacks split to allow gravestone gray wings to unfurl.

In a blink, she scooped up the kids and was standing at the door, rainwater pooling around her feet.

“Wait!” I shout.

She pauses.

“What is this? What’s happening?!”

In that many-layered voice, she says, “this is the real me. I made a deal to be human, on the condition that if anything ever happened to me, a package would arrive, and if opened, all I had created while a human would belong to the dealmaker.”

She looks mournful.

“You should run.”

And then she’s gone, swallowed by the night sky almost instantly, one girl beneath each arm. A wracking sob escapes me, and I sink to my knees, the enormity of the moment crushing me, when I hear a knock from downstairs…