C. LaSart - Ad Nauseam - 13 Tales of Extreme Horror

Can’t exactly open it. It’s not mine.

“Good morning.”

Emily nearly dropped the box as she spun around to find the postman standing at the bottom of the steps. He smiled and held out a wad of letters for her.

“Um, yeah. Thanks. Say, maybe you could help me with something.” She held out the box to him, tipping it forward so he could read the top. “I found this on my porch this morning. I don’t know what to do with it.”

The mailman looked at the writing and scratched his chin for a moment before shaking his head.

“Not ours. No postmark. Doesn’t look like UPS or FedEx, either. No marks at all.”

“Well, could you take it with you? Maybe drop it off at the post office?”

“Nope. Sorry, Ma’am. If it’s not ours, I can’t do anything with it. Maybe you could run over to the address and leave it there. Be quite a drive, though.” He shrugged his apology, already turning to walk away.

“Yeah. Well thanks anyway.” Emily tucked the package under her arm and grabbed her coffee, heading back into the house where she dropped the box on her kitchen table. Refilling her mug, she perched on the edge of a chair and stared at the box for a long time, wondering just what she should do.

I’m sure as hell not driving all the way into the city for this shit. I have work to do, she thought. Then she smiled as an idea occurred to her.

Emily wandered down the hall to the spare room she’d converted into an office several years ago upon moving in. She sipped her coffee as her computer booted, then typed the name and address into a search engine. There were hundreds of hits, but she found a link halfway down the first page that looked promising. Crossing her fingers, she clicked it and watched as a website opened. It looked like some sort of voodoo or witchcraft store called Dominik’s Dark Arts, and the address matched. There was a phone number listed just below the hours of operation.

She jotted the number down on a post-it note and carried it back to the dining room, retrieving her cell phone from the counter.

The phone rang four times before a machine answered, playing a pleasant male voice with soft wind chimes in the background.

“You have reached Dominik’s Dark Arts. I’m sorry, but I will be out of town for the weekend. Normal store hours will resume on Monday. Have a Dark Day.”

Emily waited for the beep before leaving her message.

“Hi Dominik, this is Emily Haven. There seems to have been a mix up and a package meant for you was left on my doorstep. I will keep hold of it for the weekend so nothing happens to it. Please call me at your earliest convenience and we will figure out how to rectify the situation.” She left her cell number, said goodbye to the machine, and hung up.

At least that was over. It was Friday, so she would have the whole weekend to work on her projects before possibly having to make the long trek into the city. Heading back to the office, she thought about the name Dominik Bettancourt, wondering where she had heard it before. Shrugging it off, Emily started her work for the day.

She soon forgot all about the box on her table.

Emily Haven was the founder and executive editor of Night Haven Books, a small publishing house she had built from the ground up, spending the majority of her thirties making it a success. Now in its tenth year of publishing, the company had earned a respected recognition in the field and won some awards for superior achievement by a small publishing house. Employing thirty part-time editors from all over the country, she used email and the internet to put together books and a print-on-demand press to put those books into online bookstores. Two of her contracted authors had recently made the bestseller list and business couldn’t be better. Her list of projects was long and always kept her awake late into the night.

Shortly after midnight, Emily sat at her desk, putting the finishing touches on an anthology she was formatting. The duplex was silent, the family next door asleep. Though it was a nice neighborhood and an expensive house, she could still hear the goings on next door when the kids were particularly rambunctious or their television was turned up too loud. She had even been embarrassed to hear them fight on a couple of occasions.

The sound of telephone startled her. Emily looked at her cell phone even though it was a regular ring she heard, not the jazzy ringer her cell was set to. She hadn’t owned a landline in years.

It’s too loud to be coming from next door, she thought.

Emily stood up and walked down the hall, the ringing growing louder as she went. Turning on the dining room light, she looked at the battered box on her table. The ringing seemed to be coming from within. Loathe to open someone else’s mail, but also afraid the noise might wake the children next door, Emily was unsure of how to proceed.

There must be a cell phone in there. Maybe I could just slit the tape and shut the thing off. Then tape it back up again with no one the wiser.

Grabbing a steak knife out of the block on the counter, she sat down at the table and stared at the box for a moment, willing it to be silent. It continued to ring, the shrill noise loud in the calm night. She was going to have to open it. Emily sighed and went to work, using the tip of the blade to carefully puncture the tape and slice it away. Just as she opened the flaps, the box gave a final ring and fell silent. She considered just closing it back up.

What if it starts ringing again? Well, it’s already open.

Emily reached gingerly into the box, encountering not a cell phone as she had expected, but something much larger. She grabbed it and pulled it out carefully, setting it on the counter. She was half right, it was indeed a phone, but one like she had never seen before. Roughly the size of an old rotary phone, the squat base appeared to be fashioned from a human skull, two milky grey stones glued into the eye sockets, and a realistic set of teeth grinned at her.

Resting on two brackets which were screwed into the top of the skull was the handset, half of a thigh bone with two disks affixed to the ends as a mouth and earpiece. The handset was attached to the body by what looked like a heavy braid of dark hair. She lifted it up and traced her fingers across the smooth surfaces. Obviously it couldn’t be real bone, that wouldn’t be legal, but the artist had done a great job of making the resin look authentic, down to the pale yellow hue and small pits across the surface. There were a couple of teeth missing, the eye sockets deep and dark behind the semi-transparent stones.

There was no way the thing could’ve really worked, with no jack to plug a phone line into, and no numbers or dial on the face, but it would certainly be a cool conversation piece for whoever owned it.

Emily wished for a second that it was hers; it would make a fine addition to her collection of strange artifacts in her office. It would look right at home with the hideous dolls, monster busts, and replicas of wooden stakes and silver bullets. She lifted the phone to put it back in the box, then nearly dropped it as it let out a shrill ring.

“What the fuck?” Setting the phone gently on the counter, Emily stared in disbelief as the gray stones in the eye sockets glowed an eerie red, fading and sparking in time with the shrill sound of the ringing phone.

No way. She thought, wondering for a moment if she had fallen asleep while editing and was still slumped over her keyboard, having a strange dream. It’s not even plugged in.

Emily cautiously picked up the handset, holding it up to her ear in a way that it didn’t actually touch her face.

“Hello?”