The Brown Paper Box and the Nightshade Arcade

"It's the damnedest thing," I said. "So, you didn't send it?"

"How would I have sent it? You said it didn't have a stamp or return address or nothing?" Lillith's voice said across the receiver. She was getting irritated.

"No, you're right. It just feels off somehow," I said.

"Well, open it and end the mystery babe," she said.

"I tried that, trust me, I've tried everything," I said, looking at the butcher knife I'd been using to cut almost everything but the brown paper box with. My hand had a thin red line across three fingers and the small sting of a little cut. I'd gotten lucky. But it was beginning to bleed more now.

"Yeah, I'll be right back, gimme five more minutes?" Lillith said. I heard the quiet muffled voice of someone in the background saying something else. And then she was speaking to me again, "Hey, I gotta run, Jeff's being an ass again. He's trying to make up for lost time and I think he's worried the store is going to be shut down again soon. Fucking pandemic."

Jeff, Lillith's boss at the Pizza-Pie-Stay-Alive, was anything but a calm and gentle soul. He looked like he was one pack of smokes short of a heart attack before the Pandemic ripped through the world. Now, with that humming along in the background of everything else we all did, he was always on the verge of his next big panic attack and demanding more and more hours from Lillith. It was work, and given the nature of the world and the economy, that's saying something.

"Hey babe?" Lillith said, I heard the smile in her voice, "Kiss me till I see you?"

I grinned and said, "Kissing you till I see you."

"Ok, pick me up at five, and if you still don't have that thing opened, I'll work some magic on it for you. Chat soon!"

"Chat soon," I said. I heard her pause for a moment before the line clicked.

And then it was just me, the butcher knife, a little blood leaking out of my cut fingers, and that brown paper box. Written across its front in legible but clownish handwriting, it read, "open me."

---

I stuck my bleeding fingers in my mouth absentmindedly, holding the brown paper box as I began to think about the problem life had literally put in my lap. I laid my cut fingers on the box and leaned over to one side, looking for tape, or a line where it should open or the paper should give. I felt a little sting and then raised my eyes back toward my fingers.

Shit, I thought. I'd gotten a little smear of blood on the box. The cut must have been a little worse than I realized. I made a mental note to clean it before something nasty crept in and began eating me from the inside.

Then I noticed that there was a slight tear in the package just beneath the little smear of blood. I scratched at it with the nails of my un-cut fingers and found the paper giving. I ripped through it easily now, my mind completely blown. I'd been working on this mystery box all morning since it had arrived, and nothing cut it, nothing loosened its paper, nothing opened it.

A little smear of blood and just like magic, the mystery gave itself to me.

---

"I got the box open," I told Lillith, picking her up from work. I was even early, better than on time.

"Well, show me! What was in it?" she said.

I leaned over and kissed her instead. She smiled at me and I grinned back.

"Nice kiss but I still want to know what the hell was in that box," she said, taking my hand. We always held hands when driving. I winced a little as her fingers accidentally hit the cut on my hand, I still hadn't cleaned it or bandaged it.

"Michael, you're bleeding!" she said.

You'd think I was bleeding out from the way she said it, the box all but forgotten for the time being.

"Yeah, turns out you have to hold butcher knives by their handles and not their blades, who knew?"

"Not funny," Lillith said. "Did you clean it? It doesn't look like you did."

And then there was a little pause and she said something odd, something I would think back on later and regret not paying closer attention to.

"Did the box do this to you?"

---

A little later, Lillith cleaned my cuts. She tried to bandage each finger but I looked like something out of an old black-and-white horror movie and wound up taking the bandages back off.

That's when I showed her what was inside the box.

I carried the box over and sat it on the kitchen table. My blood dried to a rusty brown in a little streak across its top. I had since found a perfect seam down the top that produced two flaps, carefully buried beneath whatever unbelievably strong paper had been sealed over the entire surface before I bled on it. I popped the flaps open and made a motion for her to come and see.

Lillith leaned in and looked. Then she looked up at me and crossed her arms, rubbing her elbows. She gave me a funny look but made no movement toward reaching in the box.

"Well?" I said.

"Well, what?" she said.

"What do you think?"

"It's creepy," she said.

Sitting in the bottom of the box on a perfect bed of packing straw was one large token with what looked like the combination of a Joker's face and a hobgoblin grinning back. Just behind it was a little notecard with perfect penmanship.

Written in bold calligraphy on the card's face read, "Time's running out to come and play pinball at Nightshade Arcade. Beat the high score and win a prize unlike nothing before!"

"Catchy slogan, right?" I said, showing Lillith. She turned her face away. "What's wrong babe?"

"It…" she began. She took a breath and breathed it back out quietly but with effort. "It just doesn't feel right."

I flipped the card and saw an address on the back, "Look at this, it has an address on it."

"Please don't tell me you're going to go there!" Lillith said.

---

I went there the next morning.

I stood outside of the Nightshade Arcade for aching long moments, flipping the card in my hand. I looked up and down the abandoned strip of old stores that sat all around me.

The Nightshade Arcade was such a strange building that felt almost camouflaged in its surroundings. Abandoned with a lived-in look.

I finally tested the door, squeezing the token as I did. I felt the little sting of each cut along my first three fingers and didn't even notice that they had begun bleeding until I looked down at the token. It had my blood on it.

I pulled open the glass door and walked in. I was only a little surprised that the door was unlocked. This entire part of town looked like it had been forgotten long ago.

I fought the urge to say hello, remembering the lesson of all those movies my Aunt and I had watched when I was growing up. Saying hello was an invitation to bad things happening in a hurry.

The inside of the Nightshade Arcade was everything I expected. It was bigger than it looked from outside but perfectly abandoned and unwanted. Old arcade games sat lifeless along the walls, several of them had busted screens and graffiti spray-painted across them. And there was a musky smell of mildew that made my nose burn.

---

"Hello," a voice said from somewhere in the back of the building. My eyes hadn't adjusted enough to make out a figure or the face that belonged to it.

I won't lie, I very nearly turned and ran for the door. Only ignorance kept me standing still.

"Hello," I said. "I received a package the other day, it had a token and a card in it with this address?"

I heard dry laughter and then saw a man stepping out of the shadows.

"My children are still sending gifts, I see," he said, a shark's grin ripped his face into an unnatural-looking smile. He had sagging skin, the wrinkles could no longer hold their weight, and his eyes looked hollow, swallowed up by their sockets. But yet there was a strength in those eyes that puckered my flesh with goosebumps.

"I see," I said. Not knowing what the hell he was going on about. "There was some mention of beating a high score? A prize?"

The man nodded his head three times, his eyes locked on me, that hungry look burrowing into me. He turned to the side and made a gesture of invitation. I looked down the length of his arm and saw just behind him one lone pinball machine, perfectly untouched by all the chaos around it. It glowed a goblin-green light from its playfield and backboard. I looked around the room once more, at all the broken games, the years of waste, ruin, rot, and abandonment, and then back at the perfectly kept pinball machine.

There was something siren-like in his invitation and I found my feet moving before my head could stop them.

---

I was near the pinball machine when the man's long hands with their even longer fingers were on my chest, stopping me. I turned nervously and looked at him.

"Your token, to play," he said, his other long hand held open, his eyes more visibly hungry than ever before.

My head felt thick. I saw myself move, but didn't feel myself give the orders.

I handed the man the token, our skin brushing against each other's slightly, and I felt the coldness of his flesh. The stiff rigidity of it. The corpse-like feel of its cold texture.

And then I came back to myself in a rush of dizzying clarity. What the hell was I doing?

"You must choose to give me the token, and you must choose to play," he said. "Do you?"

I released the token into his hand and that devilish god-awful smile of his, the one that had already swallowed half of his face grew even larger. Then he moved his hand away from my chest and made a motion toward the pinball machine. He walked along behind me, and then, slipped the token, with my blood on it, into a little slit at the edge of the machine.

I barely noticed myself beginning to play, much less took any notice as the early morning crept into the afternoon, or the several times that my phone buzzed as Lillith called and left worried voicemails. I didn't notice as I lost track of time or as I began to age, and dry up in front of that old machine that drank me like a milkshake, and I didn't notice as the old man grew younger, and once or twice one of the other old arcade machines began to flicker with just a little life.

All I noticed was the levers I kept pulling, the perfect silver ball bouncing off of various obstacles and slamming into different holes, and my score climbing higher and higher as I etched my way towards that new high score.

I didn't make it through, I came close, but eventually, I was just too weak to keep playing, my legs too tired, my bones too brittle to even hold me.

I collapsed in a heap and felt the old man carrying me off to some shadowed corner of the building to toss me into a collection of what I could imagine might have once been other people who had come to play pinball.