From where Siah stood it looked like everything was packed up. She sighed. This was proving to be harder than she thought. In the weeks since her parents had died so many people had been through the ranch home, packing things up and paying their respects. And now, everything Siah had ever known was boxed and sitting ready to be hauled off to the small apartment her mother had rented just before she died. They had been loosing the house, Siah wasn’t quite sure why, it wasn’t as if they had been short on money, but her parents had dealt with everything and they were gone now, incapable of answering her questions.
“This everything?” Daniel asked, “I had no idea you had so much stuff.”
“It isn’t me that has stuff, most of it is my parents,” Siah explained.
“What is all this?”
“I don’t know,” Siah admitted with a sigh, “When I was a little kid they kept everything either packed up or out of reach and then, you know, boarding school.”
“You never knew your parents very well,” Daniel guessed.
“Something like that.” The rest of what she was thinking stayed silent. It was true that her parents were a mystery to her. All of her home town, Kaylor, was a mystery, she never having spent much time exploring. And now here she was moving in with two boys she’s played with when she was in diapers and then never talked to again, they were her neighbors, that was supposed to inspire more confidence. But all in all it felt to Siah that she was just being dropped into this life, dropped into a new apartment in a new town with new things with new people, it was disturbing.
“Well what do we do with everything once we get home, that’s so cool to say?” Daniel was asking, “Nothing is labeled.”
“My parents were really organized but I guess they have the boxes arranged in where they go. I guess we’ll just have to put all of them in the living room until we can go through them.”
“Well let’s start moving stuff, Oliver is already trying to argue the moving men into doing something.”
Siah’s parents had a very odd taste
in houses, it seemed. While the house they were moving out of was a fairly
normal thing it was also a cookie cutter of every other house on the street.
The apartment was in a strange neighborhood on the outskirts of town that
seemed incapable of deciding if it was suburbia or an apartment complex. On top
of that you were never completely sure if you were still in Kaylor or if you
had suddenly gone spiraling off into the wilderness. All the streets looked the
same overall, in all the times Siah had visited she had never once not gotten
lost. The only difference between
Oliver was right when he said the moving
men were a pain. They argued about everything the newly eighteen year olds
asked them to do. They didn’t want to go out to
“This box is full of boxes,” Oliver said, confused, as he opened one of the boxes that Siah’s mother had packed. The other two crowded around, Daniel daring even to reach in a remove a long sealed one.
“I think they’re jewelry boxes,” Siah guessed, “But my mother didn’t wear a lot of jewelry.”
“I think its one of those dumb puzzle boxes,” Daniel offered as he struggled to open the box he had removed, “It won’t open.”
“That’s because you’re an idiot,” Oliver said and snatched the box. He tugged a little and then proceeded to try the general unlocking of a puzzle box.
“Don’t break it!” Siah exclaimed, being the third person to hold the box. She slid open the lid with no problems.
“It was a puzzle box,” Daniel said happily, “Good job, Oliver, you opened it.” But his congratulations were lost in a slight wind that swirled around the three and left them both shivering. Daniel opened his mouth again to ask someone to turn off the air conditioning but he was hit by another chill and interrupted by a loud, pounding knock on the door. All three looked at each other, none of them recognizing the knock or even knowing of anyone that would visit them at such a time. It was Siah who rose to answer the door. And when she did pull it back the first thing she saw was the snarling black dog that was straining to reach her. She screamed.
“Don’t be afraid, Mistress,” A voice behind the dog said. The figure stepped a little more into the light to reveal a tall skinny man in a faded red butler’s uniform. He was a frightening looking man, the type of look that was perfect for the strange man a movie character might pick up off the side of the road. Who would brutally murder ever main character later.
“Who are you?” Oliver demanded, helping Siah off the floor.
“I am the doorman, Master,” The strange man said with a tip of his strange hat.
“There’s a doorman?” Daniel asked.
“Do you have a name?” Siah said over him.
The strange man cocked his head ever so slightly as if he was listening to something only he could hear, “No,” He admitted, “I don’t really have a name, Mistress.”
“You don’t have a name?” She
repeated.
“You may call me whatever you
wish, Mistress,” He said and tipped his hat again, “I must return to my post,
Precious and I just wished to welcome you.” And he was gone.
“Why would someone name that snarling little demon ‘Precious’?” Daniel asked.
“Hush, he’s still nearby.”
“Ok,” Daniel conceded as he closed the door. “Anyone else thinking ‘weird’?”
“I’ve got weird on the brain,” Oliver admitted, “Where did he come from?”
“The box?” Daniel offered.
“The doorman did not come out of a box, moron,” Oliver snapped, “He’s a man, he did not come from some tiny box. Plus, he was out there, the box is in here.”
“The box!” Siah exclaimed, rushing over the box she had dropped in the suddenness of the doorman’s arrival.
“See, Siah agrees with me,” Daniel argued, “But if we have a doorman I think we should call him Phil, Phil seems like a good name for a doorman.”
“No, I dropped my mother’s box,” Siah explained as she lifted it and slid the lid all the way back, “it’s empty.”
“See,” Daniel said as if the mystery had been solved, “Phil. Phil was in the box.”
“His name is not Phil and he did not come from the box.”
“Why would my mother pack an empty box?”
“Are the others empty?” Oliver wanted to know.
“No, the rest are just jewels and whatnot.”
“Maybe she packed it because it’s a nice box.”
“Or maybe, insta-Phil, open the others, maybe we’ll get a zombie maid or a serial killer driver.”
“Do you have any logic?” Oliver asked, “Those strike me as pretty good reasons not to open anymore boxes, that combined with the fact that the doorman didn’t come from the box!”
“Do you two always bicker like this?” Siah asked. Both boys nodded.
The next couple days were uneventful. The three devoted almost all of their time to unpacking to the point that they only ate pizza and delivery Chinese until every box was organized and placed just where it needed to be unpacked. It was Oliver who stood in front of the empty refrigerator poking at the empty boxes of delivery and declared that they needed to go grocery shopping, and they needed to do it now.
“Have you ever even been grocery shopping?” Daniel asked as the three of them pushed the cart through the aisles, “I mean, rich and all, didn’t you have some servant that would do this?”
“We were rich, but not quite that bad,” Siah explained, her eyes glazing over an old woman who stared at them from across an aisle.
“I thought you were richer than anything.”
“Give her a break, Dan.”
“Anyone else see the scary woman over there?” Siah asked, “She’s been staring at us for ages.”
“Think she came from the box, too, Dan?”
“Shut up,” Daniel snapped, “She is staring pretty hard. And oh God, she’s coming over here.”
“I can smell it on you,” The woman hissed, her wrinkled lips curling back over her yellowing teeth.
“It’s probably just the garlic broccoli I had for lunch,” Oliver told her.
“No,” The woman said, snapping him into silence, “I can smell it, you, you did it didn’t you?”
“Did what?”
“The box, you opened the box didn’t you?”
“There’s a box, but I think you’re just crazy.”
“We can get you some help,” Siah added soothingly.
“I can smell it, you opened it, and now you must undo what you have done,” The woman reached out, smashing a zip-lock bag into Siah’s chest, “You must undo what you have done with the sealant.” And with that she rushed off with speed unfitting for her age.
“Crazy,” Siah said, handing the baggie back to Daniel who placed it on a shelf as they passed.
“What did she mean by box?” Oliver asked, “We did open a box.”
“She’s crazy Ver, don’t listen to the crazy woman.”
“If she’s so crazy, why’d the weird person over there just kill her?” Oliver asked, leaning forward to look at the strange looking girl that bent over the old woman from a moment before.
“What are you talking about?” Siah asked, she and Daniel rushing over to see what their friend saw. The girl that was there, standing with blood on her mouth to look at the three, was a little taller than even Oliver, she had scraggly brown hair that was all sorts of lengths, to her waist at the longest. She smiled, a snide smile of victory and then, into thin air, she disappeared. Before the girl had even stood up a young man had been at the older woman’s side, checking for a pulse.
“She’s dead,” He announced to the growing crowd that included the boys and Siah.
“What happened?” Someone asked.
“She just collapsed!”
“Did she have a heart attack?”
“Did anyone else see that girl?” Siah asked once they were back in the apartment and she was fortified on the couch with
All contents on this and any other page on Complications is the intellectual property of Rebecca Moses.
