The package was strange. It looked like a normal box that Amazon might use to ship a book, or some socks, or a computer part. Anything really. But this one was covered in a layer of dust, like it had been sitting on a shelf for years. Judging from post office date stamp, it was. It was dated almost 30 years ago. The year I was born, now that I think about it.
Oh, and it had a message written in marker next to the address label. It said, “Whatever you do, do not open this box!”
In retrospect, maybe I should have heeded that warning. But I don’t like being told what to do. Maybe that was why the warning was written. Maybe the person, or thing, who sent that box to me knew I don’t like being bossed around and wrote the exact opposite of what they wanted me to do. Maybe I’m being paranoid. I’ve gotten a lot more paranoid lately.
So of course, I ignored the warning. I brought the package into my apartment, never questioning the fact that there was no trace of the courier who had knocked and left it on my doorstep. It had my name and address on it, but the return address was just “Black Oak, Oklahoma.” Just that, nothing else. All of it was written in red marker directly on the cardboard. There was a post office date stamp, but no postage that I could see.
I set it on the table in my tiny kitchen, which is what I called the corner of my tiny apartment that had linoleum flooring instead of carpet. I blew off the dust, and a very faint bitter, musty, and sour smell filled the air with it. Using a knife from the drawer next to the sink, I sliced open the old, dried out packing tape. I opened the box, I screamed, and I jumped back, almost stabbing myself with the knife as my hip bumped the sink right behind me.
The package was full of spiders. When it opened, they exploded out, running out and away from the box like a sickening, skittering wave. Each one was the size of a quarter. They had fat round bodies, fat legs, and were covered with yellowish white fur. They looked like stunted albino tarantulas. That bitter sour smell was overpowering. They ran away from the box in every direction, except right at me thank God, faster than any bug I’ve ever seen. The sheer number of them running in every direction made a sound like sizzling bacon. They ran under furniture, into cracks in walls, under doors, and squeezing themselves into power outlet holes.
And then they were gone. It all happened in a few seconds. None were left. None. I looked under furniture, in cabinets, in my shoes, in the closets. I couldn’t find a single one of those spiders. Even the smell was gone. But I knew they were there, somewhere. In the walls maybe. My skin itched just thinking about sleeping in my own apartment that night.
Nervously, I went back and looked in the box. Inside was an empty egg sac the size of a baseball and a video cassette tape. There was no label on the tape. I had to dig an old VCR out of a box I had never opened since moving to this apartment over three years earlier. I hadn’t used it for years before that. But luckily, it still worked. (I looked in all the holes in the bottom to see if it had spiders first, trust me.) After hooking it up, I put in the tape and waited.
There was only static for several minutes. I was about to stop it when an image appeared. It was so dark and grainy, I didn’t recognize it at first. Then I realized what I was seeing: it was my apartment. It was someone walking through the front door of my apartment. I watched, transfixed, as someone holding the camera climbed the stairs to my loft bedroom.
And then, on a 30-year old video, was an image of me sleeping in my own bed. Yellow-white spiders crawled around on the sheets, in my hair. Suddenly, I could see a man’s hand in the video. It was holding a ridiculously big gun. The hand pointed the gun at my head. Then there was just static again.
As I said, the package was strange.
I’ve never moved out of a place so fast before. It sure makes moving quicker when you don’t bother to pack anything. Or tell anyone you are moving. Just grab car keys and go. That’s the ticket.
When I was a few hundred miles away, I stopped shaking. I slowed down to the speed limit, and I started thinking about where I was going. I hadn’t given it any thought. I had just headed north to Flagstaff. But I-17 doesn’t go any further north there, so I got on I-40 and started heading east. I was heading east.
“What is to the east?” I asked myself, out loud. I answered to myself, also out loud, “ New Mexico. Texas. Oklahoma.” Oklahoma . . . Right then, I knew where I was going.
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