The Red Box

Hey, everyone. This is a short story, which I haven't done much, and it's a scary story, which I also haven't done much. New things, you know. I'm working on an erotic novel, but I've got a short erotica piece or two knocking about in folders and someone suggested (everyone wave to bellie44) that I might post them.

When I wrote and posted the novella Echo and the Lone Drifter, not everyone liked it, understandably so, but some did. I know it was kind of weird, but I had a lot of fun writing it. One person who liked it got back to me and asked me to write another "egg" story for her, but this one with a man. She also wanted it to be a scary story. And here we are.

I'm sorry about the brackets in the story. I don't know how to do italics in this place. I miss them.

For me, this site is about trying stuff and finding courage and interacting with readers and other writers. To do that, you have to put yourself out there. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for reading. - Semiosis50

THE RED BOX

Harp Strathe

Saturday, November 9, 2038

Dr. Natasha Werth, Researcher

Halley VI Research Station, Antarctica

Entry: Personal log, Dr. Natasha Werth.

If anyone is reading this and I am mad or dead, it was not an accident. It was deliberate. Marcos did this to me. I believe that he slipped an order into the program that automatically processed my arrival and departure from the research station. I believe that he arranged for me to be left here for the winter.

I woke up and I was alone. I'm sure that my colleagues, my parents, and my friends have all been told something plausible to explain my absence. Marcos has always been thorough.

I have what I need to survive, but I am still in very real danger. Even when you're living with other people, winter in Antarctica is dangerous to the human psyche. The lack of social variants, the monotony of the physical environment, the confinement, the inability to go outside, all affect sleep cycles and mood and can cause depression and suicidal ideation.

I stayed with the research team for the winter season two years ago and I swore I would never do it again. I told Marcos about it. He's done this because he knows how much I hated it. It was a joke between us. Whenever I would get too serious, he would say: "Lighten up or I'll send you to Antarctica for the winter," and I would laugh.

I'm not laughing now. He's finally done it. But I don't think he intended this. I don't want to believe that Marcos meant to strand me here alone. There were supposed to have been sixteen other scientists engaged in research this winter. I want to imagine that he intended me to be stranded here with them, uncomfortable but safe.

The record says they found a crack in the carbon module and, at the last moment, pulled the winter team. But nobody pulled me. They hadn't even known I was here.

Isolation will cause changes to my brain structure. It will begin by affecting my ability to make decisions and then impair my learning and memory. I will be subject to hallucinations and, given the length of my isolation, I will most likely succumb to permanent psychosis.

Regardless of what Marcos thinks, the research that I did was my research. I did not steal his ideas. I was researching nematodes before I met him. I sent him copies of my unpublished write ups, but he wouldn't listen. He wouldn't even look at them.

And even if Marcos learns what has happened and wants to retrieve me, there would be nothing he could do about it. During winter, nobody can get to the research station. Nobody can get out. There is no communication with the outside. I am truly alone at the bottom of the world, in the coldest, darkest, most hostile climate on Earth. God help me.

#

Monday, November 28, 2038

Dr. Natasha Werth sat in a chair in the observation module, looking at the screens. Six cameras were placed outside the research station. Six screens displayed the feeds from those cameras. Each screen showed a single bright floodlight that illuminated the white snow on the ground in an exact circle, the rest darkness.

That was it. Six screens showing the same thing. But she still kept watching. In case something changed, evidently, and if that wasn't already insane, she didn't know what was.

Halley VI Research Station was made of connected modules on mechanical skis that allowed it to stay above the ice. The buildings, shaped like the wing of an airplane to reduce sheer forces, were designed to withstand temperatures down to -56 degrees. The interior of the research station was enhanced with bright, bold colors selected to combat the depression and sense of isolation.

During winter, the sun didn't rise above the horizon. It was always dark.

Every day, she would fight it, and every day, Natasha would come to the observation module. It had gotten to the point where even delaying her entrance into the observation module was a struggle. She knew compulsive behavior was a symptom of the mental disorder of the isolated mind. That there was nothing to see in the cameras. That it was unwise for her to come here and stare into them.

Distracting herself had worked for a little while, exhausting herself on the weight machines, doing laps in the swimming pool, watching films from the library. Anything not to come to this room.

But every day, she would find herself in front of this door and every day, she would fight not to open it. Closing it behind herself, she would sit in the chair in front of the screens.

It was her nineteenth day of isolation here, and Natasha did believe she was going mad, at least some. The beginnings of it, yes. She thought maybe that was happening. How would she know?

Waking this morning, or what she had arranged for her body to imagine was morning, she had looked in the mirror and met eyes that were sunken and darting, her face thinner. She didn't have any appetite, and she'd finally forced herself to schedule meals, eating them whether she was hungry or not. Natasha had showered. Exercised. In the central module, there was a dining room and recreational spaces for arts and crafts, a pool table. She had started a puzzle and forgotten it. A swimming pool, climbing walls, a gym and a sauna, a music room.

Climbing walls. Definitely she was going to be climbing the walls soon. It was good they'd left that as an option for her. Natasha laughed, a wrong sound in all the quiet, cringing, startling herself, the first time she'd heard a voice in too long.

She sounded mad as a hatter, nuttier than a fruitcake, crazy like a loon. Soon she'd be cackling away and talking to herself. They'd find her roaming the modules spouting off about aliens.

For a time, she'd tried keeping music on to try to cut into the thick of the quiet that was like a feather pillow slowly muffling all her thinking, but it was somehow even more lonely. Her fear nagged at her, nervous all the time, jumpy. Trying to write her research, she couldn't concentrate, a sign she was entering into a period of cognitive decline.

Sometimes, lately, she was convinced she wasn't alone. Just a growing sense of someone else here with her. That was also a symptom of isolation, she knew. Many people in forced isolation reported the sensation they were being watched. Natasha still didn't know what to do with the feelings.

Eight nights ago, she'd been lying in her bed and she had heard a sound that had started her heart pounding. She hadn't heard it since that night, but she couldn't seem to forget it.

It hadn't been the hushed pocks of the ventilation system, or the regular station self-maintenance noises, the processors, refrigeration. This had been a different sound, a sound like movement in the other modules. Like something in here with her, maybe several somethings. Animals.

And then she had known it was worse than animals, and Natasha, who was a scientist who didn't believe in monsters, hid beneath her covers in the heated room in the middle of nothing and shook and cried, and nobody in the whole world knew she was here except a man who hated her.

#

Monday, December 23, 2038

Dr. Natasha Werth sat in a chair in the observation module, looking at the screens. Six cameras were placed outside the research station. Six screens displayed the feeds from those cameras. Each screen showed a single bright floodlight that illuminated the white snow on the ground in an exact circle, the rest darkness.

That was it. Six screens showing the same thing.

Except for one.

Natasha was staring into the fourth screen, the fourth feed, as she had been for the last twenty-two minutes, her expression blank, and behind that was a bottomless well of fear. She was in her forty-fourth day of isolation and she knew she was unstable, knew she sometimes hallucinated. She knew her mind was playing tricks on her.

Something had changed, all right. Finally, something had changed, and that wasn't necessarily a good thing, because the odds that what she was seeing was real were so low that it pretty much was a given that she was hallucinating right now.

She was looking at a box. It was a shiny red box with a red bow on it. A gift. It was sitting exactly in the center of the camera's field of vision. She watched the feed.

#

Sunday, January 2, 2038

Dr. Natasha Werth sat in a chair in the observation module, looking at the fourth screen. It was the tenth day since the red box had arrived. It hadn't moved. It was there when she came into the room. It was there when she sat down. She would lose time watching it, gradually becoming aware, a lingering sense that she'd been busy.

She was in trouble. Some time ago--she had no way to tell how long--she'd lost track of what she'd decided was night and what she'd decided would be day, of times to eat or sleep. It was always lights-on in the station, always lights-on for her, because turning them off and joining all the darkness around her was unthinkable.

But more than that, Natasha had a problem, a right-here-and-right-now problem.

She wanted to go out there. She wanted to go and see if the box was real. Most of all, she wanted to know what was in it. Needed to know. And she also knew, knew with all of her not-insubstantial intellect, that it was not real, an hallucination.

Going out there and seeing for herself had become an itch of a compulsion that had replaced coming to the observation module.

She fought it. Once, she had actually gotten dressed, at least the first couple of layers. It had frightened her so much to have done that without making the decision to do so that she had successfully fought the compulsion for the next six days.

But she was losing.

She wanted to get dressed and go out there. Nothing would protect her in such a harsh environment, not more than maybe an hour.

[It wouldn't take that long].

She couldn't trust her own judgment, couldn't trust her senses, couldn't trust her own mind. The box wasn't real. She knew that was true, that she would endanger herself going out there, possibly an impulse to suicide. And what would happen when she got there and it wasn't real, when it wasn't there? Would she flip out? What if she came back and looked at the camera and it was there again?

[Do you have a choice?]

Yes, she had a choice. For fifty-four days, she had survived alone here. Even if she went completely crazy, if she kept it together a little longer, she could still maybe survive until they could rescue her. It was absolutely imperative that she didn't leave the station until someone came for her.

[But you looked up the date, didn't you?]

Natasha closed her eyes and nodded, cringing. March 17th. That's when they would return. Months from now. A long season. She would never make it.

Going outside was insane. She could die out there.

[What if it's real?]

"It's not real!" Natasha cried, her voice loud in the room, and then she cried out in fear directly after, having startled herself, her hand clapping over her own mouth, looking around as if she were afraid something might have heard her.

That way lay madness. She didn't talk to herself, wouldn't allow it. Sometimes she sat still with her hand over her mouth to prevent it, rocking, having become convinced, in an elaborate fear fantasy, that talking to herself would cause her psyche to split into two or maybe even three or four personalities.

It wasn't real. It wasn't.

[You don't know that. You won't know that until you go and see].

Natasha opened her eyes. Her shoulders slumped and she drew in a ragged breath. She already heard another voice. It didn't matter if it was aloud or not. She was doing it anyway.

"I can't go and see," she said to herself miserably, giving in to it, beginning to cry. She wept all the time now, and it was a relief to talk. It frightened her how much she was suddenly able to focus once she began to talk. She needed to talk. She couldn't organize her thoughts anymore. "I can't trust myself."

[Then trust me].

Natasha got up. She felt curiously free now that she had allowed herself to talk. She chattered as she went to her quarters, posing questions and answering them, commenting on her surroundings, feeling almost normal for the first time, so unfamiliar a feeling that she was afraid to stop what she was doing in case it passed.

She took off her clothing, standing and looking in the mirror. Marcos had seen something in her, approaching her at a conference, flirting. She'd been flattered, had wanted his [hands on you] attention, had been instantly infatuated.

Her eyes were on her body [touch you], running her hands over her breasts, [lick you, suck] her nipples tightening, jutting, sensitive [pleasure you], down her belly. She blinked, turning away.

Trying different arguments, her voice rose and fell. She told herself all she needed to do was hold it together and she might make it out of this alive and maybe they could piece her mind together again, but the truth was she didn't believe that and never had.

Talking, just enjoyed the sound of it, the sense of putting words together, she pulled on the wool shirt and bottoms, insulated, and thin wool socks. She argued both sides as she put the insulated vest over her core, the thin wool gloves, trousers and another pair of thicker socks.

Reminding herself aloud that the box was imaginary and asking herself what she was going to do with it even if it did appear real to her senses, she put on the balaclava, the wool hat over that, the parka, the waterproof outer mittens, ski pants and rubber boots. Taking up her yellow goggles, she fit them over her eyes. She unearthed her hand briefly and put on lip balm and slipped it back into her pocket, awkward, refitting the mitten over the gloves.

Finding herself in the hatch, facing the exit, Natasha stopped. It was her last chance. There was a brief moment where she fought it, frantic, fought it like she would if she were being pushed to approach the edge of a cliff, her mind reaching a shivering point of opposition.

In the next moment, all the resistance was gone. Her fingers were steady as they entered numbers without her thinking about them and her hand shot out, hitting the large black button. A red light above her head swirled, the lights going out and coming on again, and the huge bay doors in front of her began to rise, a buzzer sounding.

It rose to reveal a black landscape so inky that it appeared solid with darkness. She was looking into a vacuum of nothing, and beyond the black, a long way beyond the black she would have to walk through to meet it, a single light showed in a perfect circle. The first floodlight. The first camera.

She walked down the ramp toward it, wind blasting over her. Cold and dark. She floated, unable to see her own feet. There was no point in a flashlight. It was flat, what she was moving toward ahead of her and clearly visible. She fought through to it.

It was lethal cold. Her body reacted, the blood vessels in her extremities constricting, the sudden strong urge to pee, a response to fluids concentrating in her core. Her shivering was involuntary.

She didn't have much time out here. It only took a three to four degree drop in temperature for a person to go into hypothermia. If she stayed out here too long, her thought processes would become even more muddled than they already were. She could quickly become confused, lost out here, wander off and not even know it.

[Just keep going].

Keeping her eyes on it, she walked to the floodlight. Arriving, she stood in the small circle it provided and imagined that somewhere inside, in the observation module, she was on the screen, the cameras filming her, the feed showing her standing here.

For a moment, she thought she was actually still sitting in the observation module, feeling the chair digging into her back, staring blankly into the screens, and with that thought she looked toward the second light. It was so far.

She reached it, fighting the wind. When she looked back, she could see the floodlight she'd just left, the light broken by ice in the wind, a blurring of the ground as it swept across it. But she couldn't see the station.

Jesus, she was going to hyperventilate. She could not panic out here, had been trained better than this. Concentrating, she closed her eyes, breathing slowly, and then opened them, the third floodlight ahead. The first step was the hardest and then it was easier.

Arriving at the third floodlight, she avoided looking ahead to the fourth floodlight, the fourth feed inside the observation module. Either answer was disastrous and she couldn't tell which one she feared more or wanted more.

If the red box wasn't real, she was mad. If it was real, she was mad.

If it wasn't there, she'd go back, she promised herself, and she'd find a way to lock the door to the exit, find a way to keep herself from going into the observation module. When rescuers got to her, she would walk out of this forsaken place, please, she wanted away from here so very badly, any way that was possible. She looked up at the fourth floodlight.

The box was there. She could see it, light falling on a red box sitting on white snow floating in inky darkness. All the edges were crisp. Walking toward it, she entered the circle of the light. It was a perfectly square box, as tall as her thighs, wrapped in shiny red paper with a red bow.

Somewhere in the empty station, an empty chair sat in front of the screens. But it wasn't just the box showing on the fourth feed now. It was also her standing in front of the box. She was watching herself standing in front of the box. She was standing in front of the box watching herself on the monitor standing in front of the box.

Was she here or was she watching the feed? She realized she had turned away from the box and was staring blankly into the black, but she didn't have a memory of moving.

Turning back and getting closer, she fell to her knees beside the box, touching its red perfection, the gloves she was wearing giving her no information except that it was there, a solid object. Real, if she wasn't simply hallucinating.

The box moved.

Natasha straightened and stepped back, removing her hands, her breath-vapor increasing. It had moved, hadn't it? There must be an uneven weight. It must have shifted when she'd touched it. She walked around it and then approached, touching it. Nothing. Without willing herself to do so, she reached and lifted it.

It was so ridiculously light that it should have been immediately pulled out of her hands by the wind, shouldn't have been able to stay in place anywhere. Something shifted inside but she thought it was just weight redistributing. She shook it gently. It was like there was something a bit heavy in there, something rolling around, loose.

She wanted to know what was in it. Natasha began to walk, holding the box up in front of her, now at the third spotlight. There was the distance between the third to the second floodlight, and then the distance from the second to the first. Breathing out, able to see the station now, the entrance, she saw the bay open, waiting for her. Snow had drifted into it, piling a little. She stopped, the red box in her hands.