¡La Caja de la Muerte!
22 Sep 06
I was surprised to hear the knock on my door at midnight. Very few visitors come by, even during the daylight hours -- none come so late. I would never have heard the knock had I not been in my chair, writing -- working on a small piece on the supernatural. I hesitate even to set the fact down on paper, as the coincidence seems too contrived, but I'd been writing a passage about an unexpected nocturnal visitor.
The knock startled me, and our cat Mia, who'd been drowsing in my lap, leapt to the floor and crouched, ready to flee. My heart raced. . . should I arm myself? The idea seemed preposterous. I'd just look through the peephole to see who'd arrived.
No one had arrived. Or rather, no one still stood at the door. I paused, my hand on the knob. Should I open it?
Shaking off what seemed an unreasonable fear, I opened the deadbolt and turned the knob. The night was cool and silent: no traffic, no insects, and no visitors. . . or interlopers.
There was just a box.
I nearly closed the door and left the box where it lay. Perhaps I should have. Instead, I reached down towards it -- but I paused. Perhaps I'd drifted off for a bit while I wrote, lulled by the soporific effect of a warm proximate cat. Perhaps I'd drunk more bourbon than I thought. Or perhaps some other causality was at work, something subtle but ineffable. Whatever the reason, the scene had a dreamlike quality of déjà -vu: this scene was foreseen and destined, and had already happened. A scrim of light seemed to dust everything as I put my hands around the box and lifted it.
The box itself was not heavy, but I felt a great weight inside me as I lifted it up and carried it into the house.
The wood of the box was weathered heavily, as if it had, during some long-past time, spent years in the elements. It was assembled in an odd manner, with no marks of modern tools. It was solid, but at the same time, the workmanship seemed slipshod, as if the builder had hurried -- or perhaps the weather had warped the originally tight-fitting boards.
I nearly missed the attached note, which slipped off as I examined the box. It was written in an old-fashioned, almost calligraphic hand. With a little apprehension, I opened it -- it had been sealed with wax, something I had never seen -- and began to read:
My dearest grand-nephew,
As I promised you so long ago, here is the box.
I trust you will know how to keep it.
L. Quentin Reñor
My head swam. . . L.Q.R. was my great uncle, a dear older relative. When I was young, it was he alone who approved of my more esoteric studies, and who encouraged me to write. Our visits to him were rare, and always there would be murmurs that he was not, in fact, really my great uncle, but no one ever told me the full story, despite my pleading.
I had the box. This fact meant that Uncle Quentin had died. He'd always promised that he'd leave me something of particular importance. "I'll leave it to you," he'd say, "because I can trust you."
The day had come. I felt sorry that I'd been so rarely in touch with Uncle Quentin, but my reminiscence gave way to a further examination of the box. There was no catch or clasp; there was only a hinge of leather twine connecting the lid to the back of the box. A trace of that scrim of light from before seemed to hang around the box as I set it down again.
I must note that Mia did not approve of any of these proceedings. She'd been startled by the knock, just as I had been, but she still behaved in an agitated manner, long after she should have calmed. She would not return to my lap, and she regarded the box with narrow eyes. The fur of her tail still all on end, making a bottle brush of it, and her hackles were raised. She seemed ready to flee. . . or to fight.
At the time, I hardly registered her agitation. I wish now that I had paid more attention to the behavior of the little cat. Animals often seem attuned to vibrations that humans can no longer feel, if we ever could.
It seemed time to open the box. I sat it on the table, took a deep breath (without thinking why), and reached for the lid.
What I found inside left me a changed man.
I will speak of that discovery later, if ever. But I now must record something else, something which makes the rest seem calm and well ordered by comparison. It is the story of my dreams that night.
In a sense, I didn't feel as though I truly slept, but tortured and twisted visions filled my head. Images shifted into one another: the contents of the box, half-remembered snippets of my childhood, every dank and crumbling space that had ever made me think of a world other than our own. In the midst of this, a clear spot appeared, an eye, a calm in the maelstrom.
In it stood my uncle.
Let me disclaim here: I do not believe in the fantastic and the supernatural -- or perhaps I did not. But my mind has been, in my adult life, quite sound and reasonable. The clearest explanation comes from my uncle's beliefs, whether they are true or whether they merely impressed themselves upon my mind.
He told us often, when I was little, that dreams were nothing more than astral projections of what some called the soul, and that it was possible to meet others in this plane, whether they were among the quick or among the dead. It was -- it must have been -- these stories that led me to see my uncle. I imagined him much as he must have been in his prime, and dressed in old-fashioned formal clothes.
In the dream, he stepped forward and clasped my hand in both of his, shaking it warmly.
"You're now the guardian," he said. "I'm sure you'll make me proud."
"But the. . . ." I could hardly get out the words, given the shock I'd received. "The contents are. . ."
My uncle's face fell.
"You mean. . . you mean that you've. . . opened it?"
Slowly, I nodded my assent.
My uncle's eyes and cheeks hollowed, as though he'd aged years in moments. His image began to recede and fade.
"Wait," I called to him.
He seemed to shake his head slightly, his hollow eyes locked on mine, until the apparition disappeared.
Then the dreams returned with new force.
Welcome to the latest miniatures project at Minutiae: ¡La Caja de la Muerte! What's in the box that's so damn horrifying? Let's find out. . . .
Zombies!
A couple years ago, I invested in two or three full sets of Games Workshop zombies. My plan was to assemble them much as I'd done with my Mordheim gang: oddly and (I hope) with character. I had the advantage of a few years of modeling experience since my Mordheim days, and I'd learned to sculpt a bit, so I figured things would be equally imaginative, but a little more skillful. :)
The name for the project came to me about the same time as the idea, but I never got around to doing it. Life got more hectic, and miniatures moved further and further from my mind. But I've recently found some free time, and so I decided to give it a go.
The first thing I needed was a box. The shoebox that housed my collection wasn't really going to do it, so I decided on something a little more interesting. My family and I have been redoing the outbuilding behind my house, which was previously sided in weathered oak. I really like the looks of the wood, so I used that for the sides of the box. My brother had recently torn down a barn for a friend, so I had some old pine to use for the top and bottom.
I didn't finish the wood, as part of the appeal was the weathered surface. I think sanding the inside might've been a better bet, and I'll certainly do that if I build another box.
It's neat to have actual wormholes in a project, though, as long as the worms are all long dead.
The only real problem was that of the hinges. . . leather seemed like a good bet, so after kicking around a few ideas, I went with a sort of stitched hinge.
I fixed each end of the hinge with a hammered copper disk. (OK, they're pre-1982 US pennies.)
I figured with a box to hang the miniatures project on, things might go more smoothly. The rules for this are fairly simple: I'll bang out a death-and-decay miniature whenever possible. :) I'm shooting for once a week, but my schedule is sort of variable these days, and I'm less willing to commit to that sort of timetable. Another difference is that I'm going to be selling off some of what I make on eBay.
As with the Mini-a-Week project, I'm going to sculpt miniatures and paint other stock miniatures where appropriate.
I think it'll be fun to get back into the miniatures scene. :) As always, please email with any questions or comments. (If it's been a while since this update, you might want to check the address on the main page, to make sure things haven't changed.)