He looked back again. He couldn’t help it.
A hand was coming out of the trunk.
Gray and waxen—the hand of a long-dead thing. It was thin, the fingers terribly long, the bones projecting under that drab stretching of skin. If it were to grab him, Luke figured each finger could wrap around his ankle at least twice. Every finger was tipped with a sharp black nail.
It was, he realized with dawning horror, the same hand he’d seen inside the standing pipe—the hand belonging to the creature they’d fled in the swamp.
That thing that was here, now, in the basement.
He’d been wrong to fear his mother. His mother could be cruel, yes, but at least she was human.
Is this actually happening?
This was the most adult question Luke had ever asked himself. There was no place in the normal world, the world his mother and father and brother lived in, the world of baseball and snow cones and sunshine, for this thing to exist.
This is not really happening, he thought, more definitively now. And quite suddenly, the crawl space turned insubstantial, gauzy—a dreamscape. He felt a strange inner buoyancy, as though his stomach were full of soap bubbles. He drifted on a sudsy wash of horror, but it was dream-horror, unattached to real-life concerns. A giant hand in his Tickle Trunk, how silly! It was nothing to be afraid of, really…
He realized, with a thickness of mind he felt only when waking from a very deep sleep, that the voice he was hearing in his head was actually coming out of the trunk. An insidious, narcotizing mimicry of his own voice—it slipped out of the trunk and slid into his ears like some effortless oil. It matched his own voice exactly… or almost exactly: it held a coppery undernote that rasped over the vowels and consonants like a straight razor over a barber’s strop.
Nothing to be afraid of… not really happening…
Luke turned to face the door again and started to crawl desperately. His fingernails and kneecaps scraped the cement, opening the skin up. The door galloped away in heart-clutching increments—he chased it the way a car pursues a heat shimmer on the highway: always tantalizingly close, but you never quite catch it.
The hand spider-walked down the trunk. The attached arm was long and sinewy and seemed both boneless and jointless: a ropy appendage like a fire hose.
I don’t exist, Lukey-loo. You said so yourself, didn’t you? You’re just a big dummy, like your brother says…
But it did exist—at least right then it did. And that could be all the time a creature like this ever needed.
He crawled, blood welling on his knees, throwing a glance over his shoulder at the trunk. The crawl space light went out.
Luke didn’t know if something had switched it off or if the bulb had chosen that exact moment to go out. It didn’t matter. The darkness galvanized his blood. Maybe the darkness was better, in a weird way.
He raised his back, pumped his legs, and scurried across the crawl space. The wooden beams raked his spine but he didn’t feel any pain. His adrenaline was redlined, the fear sharpening the edge on his every sense. He could hear the thing’s arm slithering and shucking across the grimy cement—a huthump! huthump! noise, as if it were flapping in a wavelike motion, those long nail-tipped fingers digging into the cement for purchase and then huthump! as it flicked forward another foot.
The door was closer—he could see the light of the basement now, the edge of the water heater. Mercifully, the crawl space was shrinking back to its old dimensions. Or maybe they’d never changed: it was just another nasty trick the thing in the trunk had been playing on him.
HuTHUMP!
Right behind him now.
Luke swore he felt a hard cold finger touch his ankle, a sharp nail leaving a sizzling line of pain.
With a final convulsive heave, Luke propelled himself through the door frame and into the forgiving light of the basement. As he skittered away on his heels, his eyes were drawn to the square of blackness housing the crawl space.
All was silent, only the drumming of blood in his ears.
But he may’ve seen something. Maybe not.
Eyes? Black, ageless, regarding him from the dark.
Some other time, Lucas. We have all the time in the world.
The adrenaline curdled in his veins. Luke hurtled upstairs, bawling. His mother was too shocked to insist he go back down.
But she got her hangdog husband to bring the trunk up. Luke sat on the front porch, chewing his fingernails to the quick as his father had hauled it up two flights of stairs, quiet as a church mouse. Afterward, he’d given Luke a sheepish grin, his shoulders sunk forward and his hands deep in his pockets. What are you gonna do? his expression said. Luke had never known his father any other way. He was broken by the time Luke had been born, and was beyond hope by the time he could’ve been of any use to either of his sons.
Luke stayed away from his room until bedtime. He begged to stay up a half hour later to read his comics quietly in the family room, but his mother refused. Of course she refused.
The Tickle Trunk sat in the corner of his room. He forced himself to open it. Empty. By then, the events in the crawl space had taken on the taint of absurdity. Nightmares get blown apart in the sane light of day, even in a boy’s mind. And Luke was a rational boy; everyone said so. His knees were skinned and his palms scraped, but there was no cut on his ankle from the creature’s nails.
No, it had been a silly episode. Luke was embarrassed to think about it.
But…
One corner of the trunk had been pried up. A triangle of that strange brown skin was peeled back from its interior, as if something had come out through there.
A tiny rip, no more than an inch. Would that have been enough?
A different boy, one more flighty than Luke, might’ve viewed it as a sign. Something wanting him to know it’d been inside the trunk. Not a figment of his imagination—no way, nohow. It wanted to show how it’d gotten in, and leave the hint that it could easily do it again. Any old time it wished.
The next day Luke “accidentally” spilled fish oil over the trunk. God, that smell could gag a maggot, his father said when he got home. Why he’d been in the proximity of the trunk with a full bottle of fish oil was a fact Luke could never fully explain. But the deed had been done. The room had to be aired out; Luke slept on the sofa for two nights. The trunk was thrown away. His mother had her methods of making Luke pay for that, but at least it was gone. He never saw it again…
…except for once, years later, in a dream.
He dreamed that the Tickle Trunk sat at the city dump. The moon cast its pallid light over the windblown piles of trash. The trunk’s lid hung open like a cavernous, toothless mouth.
A raccoon trundled through the stinking wasteland. It scrambled up a softening heap to the trunk. Nose twitching, it clawed up the bloated wood to squat on top of it. Next it screeched, having seen something inside the trunk that must’ve left it petrified. The lid levered up, snapping closed on its back. The sound of the raccoon’s spine breaking was as sharp as the report of a .22 cartridge.
The raccoon slipped bonelessly inside. The lid closed. The trunk swayed slowly, the way a mother rocks a child in her arms. Inside, the raccoon started to scream. This had been the worst part of the dream—the way the animal had sounded very much like the squall of an infant.