The Box

PROMPT: Doors

GENRE: Sci-fi Thriller 

It’s been three months of cleaning vents clogged full of stardust by day and being lulled to sleep by a dashboard of blinking, multi-colored lights and we still haven’t gotten clearance to dock in the Celestial Port. It’s the unidentifiable cargo, control tower keeps saying. Open it up, report back – doesn’t have to be detailed or even fully accurate – just report back and as long as it hasn’t got three rows of teeth or radioactive bits we can dock.

But that’s just it – try as we might (and we have) we can’t open the doors. We’ve run every test available and even tried to pick its key lock. The tests have told us next to nothing and the lock remains unimpressed. All of my superiors and supervisors have retreated to the conference room to pour over databases, to call in specialists among their numerous contacts to try and figure out what exactly it is we pulled out of that shimmering, crumbling wreak. It has been left up to me and Carlisle, the other low-ranking researcher, to keep an eye on the thing. The ship has always been a strange place to live, but in these past few months, with everyone on edge and our time and funding dwindling, it has become positively eerie.

And all the while The Box sits in the cargo hold, silent and still, sealed up tight. Except – though I haven’t the nerve nor the conviction to mention it to anyone – not quite.

In our months together I have become quite acquainted with The Box. It is a tall, sleek, imposing thing, seemingly hewn of black stone; though our cargo hold is fairly clean (for a cargo hold) a thin layer of dust seems to permanently coat The Box’s surface. An observer would call it plain if they viewed the thing from far away, but the closer you get the more apparent the ornate designs carved into the stone become. Our linguist is working with a rubbing of the carvings and speculates that it’s some variety of lost language, but all I know is that they’re very beautiful and occasionally unnerving.

Or perhaps, that’s just The Box in general, as a whole. The Box is very unnerving. There are no windows and only one set of doors. How can we tell they are doors? Because there is a keyhole – and not the usual out-dated, slit of metal kind. The Box is, apparently, meant to be opened only by an antique skeleton key of iron. In addition to being its most puzzling feature, the key hole is also its most unnerving one, for it seems that The Box is becoming acquainted with me in turn.

Only two weeks into our predicament, I was on shift watching The Box when a whisper of song floated toward me. It had been quite some time since music had been played over the intercom and there was no where else for the sound to come from. It took me half of that night to discover that the snatches of song emanated from The Box. And it watches, too. This sounds mad, I know, and true many of my shifts are when the whole ship is sleeping and the place is already ominous. But there are bits of movement, sounds of scuffling, and of breath from inside the keyhole and once I swear I saw the glimmer of an eye. Last night, though it could have just been a dream – a combination of stress, not enough sleep, and stardust-clogged vents – but I think it whispered my name.

Whatever The Box holds or whatever The Box is, I very much doubt that it has three rows of teeth or emits any kind of radio activity. But I’ll tell you this – I don’t think the Celeste Port will ever clear us for docking while The Box is on board.

And so I find myself, at three in the morning local time, crouched in the corridor clutching my little plasma gun. The safety is off and I am trying to remember how to breathe and how to shoot, for, though it might just be all of the stardust in the air and the way my brain is humming for sleep, but I swear I have just heard the lock click and the doors swing open.