Twisted Roads – Twisted Horror Stories by Matthew Tonks

What’s in the Box

He grabs his hair in tufts and grimaces, as he presses his lips together, rolls his jaw, scrunches his nose, and lets out a stuttering breath. Beads of sweat gently trickle down his forehead, and his eyes narrow as he focuses on the box, then back up to Louie.

“We could be in there,” he says.

Louie smiles nervously and raises a brow. “But we’re not.”

“Open it then! Open it and prove me wrong!”

Louie laughs. “I—I—I don’t need to, because we both know we’re not in there, are we?”

“Says you, but me, I’m pretty sure if you open it up”—he points to the ceiling—“that roof will go up, and we’ll look up at us, looking up at us, looking up at us.”

He shakes his head and curls his lips. “Are you listening to yourself? Do you realise how insane you sound right now?” he says as he reaches out for the box, only to have him grab his hand.

“What if we’re dead?”

“W-What?” Louie says, as he jerks his head back and raises his brow in confusion.

“I mean, what if we are in the box, and we’re dead?”

“I—I—I get what you said, I just don’t understand why the fuck you said it. Do we look dead?”

He waves a hand and lets out a gasping breath. “Bah! What do we know? If you open the box and you find us dead, we’ll be dead.”

“What? That doesn’t make sense, you realise that, don’t you? If we’re dead, we’re dead. We wouldn’t be running around thinking we’re alive—we’d be dead.”

“B-But what if we’re only alive because we don’t know we’re dead? You know, like Schrödinger’s cat.”

“Schrödinger’s what now?”

“Cat, you know, the cat in the box. It’s dead or alive, but you only know the answer if you open the box. It’s a paradox experiment, where something can be two things at once.”

He looks down at the box, his lips trembling as his hand shakes, hovering over the box. He squeezes his hand into a fist, then opens it again, shaking it vigorously before looking back up at him. “Y-Y-Y-you don’t actually think we’re in the box, do you? Y-Y-You don’t actually think w-we’re in the box, do you?”

He shrugs his shoulders and pulls an awkward face. “We could be, you don’t know, and you won’t until you open it.”

Louie looks back down at the box and squeezes his hand into a fist once more as a fresh bead of sweat splashes across his brow. “D-D-Do you really think?” he says as his trembling hand reaches for the box.

“Until we open the box, anything could be possible—that’s what the theory was all about. The infinite possibilities of anything and everything. Sure, we might not be in the box, and we might not be dead, but on the flip side of it all, we might be in the box, and we also might be dead. And until we know it, we’ll just continue on without rhyme or reason, until the time that we find out.”

Louie stares at him for a few moments, then closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and opens the lid of the box. From beneath one half-closed eye, he stares down into the room. His breath catches as he glimpses something—impossible, familiar, yet distorted—reflected back at him from within the box.

“D-D-Do you see it?” he whispers, his voice almost a whimper.

The other man looks over, his eyes widening as he peers down. In the dimness, their own faces seem to stare back, unblinking—not dead, yet not alive. Slowly, he glances over his shoulder, up, into the void where the roof once was.

Above them, his own eyes stare back.