HIS MOTHER HAD FOUND IT at Treasure Village, a flea market on the outskirts of Lake Okoboji.
It called out to me, she’d told Luke with a self-satisfied smile. It said: pick me, Ms. Ronnicks. Pick me for Lucas. His very own Tickle Trunk. He’ll just adooore me.
Tickle Trunk. His friends had the same type of thing—except theirs were called toy boxes. But his mother insisted on the name, as she insisted on a great many things. A Tickle Trunk for my special boy, she’d said. A special place for all his ticklish things. She’d seen it at the flea market amid the ninja stars and chipped knickknacks—seen it and known. It must’ve shone like a beacon to her.
Oh, she would have thought, Luke will just die when he sees this.
The trunk was a nasty trick. Luke knew that right away. Exactly the sort of trick his mother liked to play from time to time to show who was boss. But of course she presented it as a gift, a token of love and affection.
Tickle Trunk. That name. Luke pictured a trunk lined with disembodied fingers—hundreds of them, callused and bony with nicotine-stained fingernails—and if he wasn’t careful those fingers would snatch him, drag him inside, and tickle and pinch him until he screamed . . .
The trunk appeared joyful. It was big enough that Luke’s seven-year- old body could fit inside, and was decorated with smiling clown faces. His mother urged him to name them, the same way Clayton would name his poor mice.
Look, there’s Chuckles, she’d say, pointing them out. And this one can be Koko. And there’s Mr. Tatters and Floppsy and Punkin Pie.
The trunk’s lid was rounded like that of a treasure chest. The clowns’ faces stretched over its top, as warped as reflections in a funhouse mirror. If you looked closer, you’d notice most of the clowns weren’t smiling so much as leering. Their lips were swollen and too red, as if they’d been painted with blood. And if you looked very closely, the lips of a few of those clowns—the ones his mother had named Bingo and Pit-Pat, specifically—were parted just slightly to disclose what looked like a row of dis- colored, daggery teeth.
The trunk had a huge silver latch. If you got trapped inside the trunk— if that were to happen somehow, accidentally or not—that latch would keep you locked in. Its interior smelled like the white balls Luke’s neighbor Mr. Rosewell scattered under his crab apple tree to keep mice away . . . that, plus another smell, impossible to name. The trunk was lined with cracked brown skin; Luke imagined it’d been stripped off an alligator, or a Komodo dragon. The skin was tacked inside the box with dull brass rivets.
Luke didn’t like the box. No, his feelings were stronger than that— he hated it on sight. He wondered if whoever had sold it to his mother had given her a steep discount just to get it off his hands.
Luke hadn’t wanted it in his room, which was of course where it ended up. His mother insisted.
Now you’ve got a spot for all your stuff, she said mock-brightly. A place for everything, and everything in its place.
He grudgingly threw his toys into it—all but his most precious ones, which he couldn’t imagine leaving inside. His foolish prepubescent self had been scared that when he closed the lid, the trunk would release an acid that would melt them into runny goo like beaten eggs; its lid would open and close, a pair of greedy lips, gummy strings of what had been his Matchbox cars and army men stretched between them.
Feed us, Lucas, he’d imagine it whispering in a guttural voice after all the houselights had been switched off. We’re so hungry. So hungry. Feed us any old thing; we don’t mind. It’s all meat. Come closer, why don’t you, so we can tell you what we really want . . .
He hated sleeping with it in his room. Clayton had been spending most nights down in his lab by then, so it was just Luke and the trunk and the shadows cast by the backyard maple bending over the walls.
Sometimes he’d awaken with a shudder and swear he’d heard the trunk moving on its casters: the sound of marbles rolling across a pane of glass.
He decided one night to mark the trunk’s edge with a piece of sidewalk chalk; the next morning, Luke discovered with fright that it had moved an inch over the line. Slowly but surely it was advancing toward his bed.
When he told Clayton, his brother smirked.
The floor is warped. The trunk is on wheels. Of course it rolls a little, dummy.
The next day, he dragged the Tickle Trunk down to the basement. His parents were both out. Clayton was supposed to watch Luke, but he’d left the house on a specimen hunt. It was Luke’s best chance to rid himself of it once and for all.
He hated touching the wormy grain of its wood, festooned with those capering clowns. As he’d backed down the staircase with it, the trunk sat heavily against his chest; its weight was dreadful, a slab of pulsating stone.
He dragged it across the kitchen linoleum and bumped it down the basement stairs. He dropped it, breathing heavily, and opened the crawl space door. A three-foot-tall storage room sprawled over half the basement. Inside were old boxes cowled in spider’s webs, full of stuff Luke’s parents had no use for but were loath to throw away.
He snapped on the light bulb, which swayed on a knotted cord, and pushed the trunk past the crawl space door. He got on his hands and knees and pushed it farther inside. Dust motes swam in the air. His heart thumped; his mouth could’ve been packed with sawdust. He wanted to abandon the trunk at the very back of the crawl space. It seemed to have gained fifty pounds since he’d lugged it out of his bedroom.
Suddenly he pictured the crawl space light bulb burning out, the door slamming shut, and the trunk lid popping open.
Alone at last. That guttural whisper—but real this time, not just in Luke’s mind. Come here, Lucas, and let us whisper in your ear. No? Okay, we’ll come to you . . .
Anxiety coated Luke’s brain in a suffocating glaze as he pushed it to the very back of the crawl space. It was early afternoon; sunlight streaked through a dirty casement window. If it weren’t for that fragile link to the outside world, Luke might not have gotten it that far.
He let go of its handle—for an instant his hands wouldn’t come un- glued—and started back toward the door. The trunk sat in the fall of weak sunlight, bloated and sullen.
“There,” Luke said with a triumphant little smile. “You stay where you belong.”
That night, his mother forced him to go fetch it again. In the dark. She’d immediately noticed it was missing. Luke was positive she had been waiting for Luke to try something sneaky. She crossed her enormous fat-girdled arms at the dinner table, eyeing him down.
“The trunk, Lucas. You’ve moved it.”
Luke didn’t look up from his plate. He pushed peas around with his fork. “I put it downstairs. It’s just, there’s not enough room. The trunk’s big and our bedroom, with me and Clay both in it, it’s really too—”
“What do you suggest? Move into a mansion?” Harsh, barking laughter. “Do you think your father could afford that?”
Luke swallowed, forced his head up.
“I don’t like it, Mom. I’m sorry. Thank you for buying it, but . . .” Her mouth set in a hard line—it was the only part of her body that
hadn’t gone permanently soft.
“You’ve hardly given it a chance. You will go downstairs, Lucas Adelaide Nelson. You will bring it up.”
The dread etched on his son’s face forced Luke’s father, Lonnie, to intervene.
“Beth, honey, do we really have to—?”
Lonnie’s objection died with a glance from his wife. He gathered his menthols and cup of tea and slipped into the family room.
“What are you waiting for?” His mother’s arms remained crossed. “An engraved invitation?”
Luke sat rooted to his chair. It wasn’t a matter of wanting to move— he physically couldn’t. His mother gripped his wrist fiercely and marched him to the basement door.
“Go,” his mother said. “Now.”
Luke didn’t argue. He had a vague but dire notion that given reason, his mother could conjure torments worse than whatever the trunk held in store.
He trooped down the squeaky, swaybacked stairs. He waved his hand around until his fingers brushed the basement’s light cord. The bulb illuminated his father’s workbench, the water heater, and the door to Clayton’s unoccupied lab.
His mother shut the door. Luke’s heart made a donkey kick in his chest.
It’s just a stupid trunk, he told himself. It’s ugly and gross but it’s not alive, okay? It can’t hurt you.
Then why did you try to get rid of it? asked a second, traitorous voice. And why did it inch across your bedroom floor?
The crawl space’s cheap plywood door swung open to reveal a darkness that raised the downy hairs on his arms. The trunk lay inside, waiting.
You’re back, Lucas! So soon, so soon. Lovely. Do come in.
The crawl space’s light cord dangled to the left of the door, a flimsy string with a bell-shaped bob of plastic on the end. It took a few adrenaline-pinching seconds to find it—had it been moved? He overbalanced, nearly toppling face-first onto the floor.
His fingers brushed the cord. He’d reached too far at first.
The trunk sat where he’d left it, at the very back of the crawl space. Boxes were stacked on either side, forming a rough corridor. He hadn’t noticed the alignment that afternoon. Had someone—something— moved the boxes?
He crawled toward it. Silky rustling noises emanated from behind the boxes. Mice? But they didn’t have a mouse problem. Clayton had trapped them all. Every last squeaker.
Luke’s nose filled with the smells of wood rot and mildew. Our house is diseased, Luke thought weirdly. But only right here, in the crawl space. And Luke was in the heart of the disease now, crawling toward its decaying tumor.
He craned his neck back to the door—he’d seen something in his periphery, or sort of thought so. Fleeting movement behind the stacked boxes, a skittering of little legs as something moved behind him.
To do what? Close the door? Switch off the light?
Luuuucas. You’re such a precious boy. So soft, so pretty. Come closer. Fuck you, Luke thought. He’d never uttered this word aloud (God only knew what his mother would do to him), but it felt good to say it in his head. FUCK you, box. I can burn you and say it was an accident. I can flood you until your wood bloats and rots. I can leave you on the stoop on garbage day when Mom’s gone and the garbage men will take you to the dump, where seagulls will drop gooey turds all over you.
The trunk waited for him, unmoving, unblinking.
Luke’s head jerked. He saw it again—something moving behind the boxes. They were in rows like big brown teeth, and he saw or thought he’d seen something scuttling between the gaps.
A pair of pants . . . were those pants? They were wadded up like the skin of an enormous serpent on top of one box. And something else that might have been a lampshade. And something that looked like—The trunk’s latch snapped open. It made a silvery snipping sound. Luke turned in time to see it happen. The metal hasp fell forward lazily like the tongue lolling from a tired dog’s mouth.
Luke couldn’t believe it—that is to say, his mind couldn’t process it. There wasn’t a puff of wind. No earthquake had shaken the house’s foundation. The latch had simply . . . opened.
The clowns on the trunk suddenly seemed different. Their eyes were tracking him now. Pinning him in their fleshless, jeering gaze.
Luke spun wildly on his knees. As he did, he heard a sound that chilled the ventricles of his heart.
Eeeee . . . the trunk’s hinges levering up.
He didn’t want to look back. Not one bit. But his skull was gripped by an immense force, which twisted it slowly around.
The trunk was open. Not much. It couldn’t open fully, as the lid would hit the crawl space’s ceiling.
No, it was open only a bit. Just a hair.
When he faced back the other way, an odd thing happened. The crawl space elongated, its dimensions stretching like taffy. The door was thirty feet away, when it should only be twenty . . . and it was moving farther away by the second.
Lucas, don’t go. Staaaaaaay.
Luke began to scrabble toward the door, his fingers scraping madly at the cement. A spider web broke across his face, strangling the cry build- ing in his throat. He wanted to call out for Clayton, his mother, anyone, but his voice had fled into his stomach—all that came out of his mouth was a breathless whisper.
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 in- side 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 only felt 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 effort- less oil. It matched his own voice exactly . . . or almost exactly: it held a coppery under note 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 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 in- side 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.
A substance resembling red pancake batter burped out of the trunk. The lid opened again. The moon shone down from its icy altar, the dump wrapped in stillness once again.
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Check Out Nick Cutter in person! He will be reading from his latest work THE DEEP at the IFOA Festival in Toronto - Sunday, October 26, 2014 - 11:00 AM