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The Trunk
Trinity Martin
Monica dropped the last bag of groceries into the trunk of her new car and then stepped back to view the spectacle. The trunk was gigantic, a colossus of space, and most of it lay covered with paper and plastic bags filled to the brim with food, but there still remained space that went unfilled. She had driven to the supermarket that day on a mission to buy more food than could be fit into the space, to see if that was even possible. She remembered the day her and her husband stood on the car lot and viewed the trunk for the first time.
“We just need more room for groceries and things,” she had said, “We’re not trying to transport elephants, John.”
“I’m tired of the complaining about not having enough room for stuff,” John had said, “Now the problem is solved. Do you not like the car?”
Monica gazed at the smooth lines of the vehicle and their reflection in the sparkling red paint and she said, “Of course I do. I love it.”
“Well there you go,” he had said, and then he clapped his hands together loudly. The sound rang out like a church bell across the car lot. “This will be the car. Besides, I’ve never heard anyone turning down a great deal on a nice car because it had too much trunk space.” She had never heard of that either, so she agreed and they bought the car.
Monica closed the trunk and got behind the wheel, and then she slipped on her sunglasses and pulled away from the store, driving toward her neighborhood. The day was hot, the sun a vivid and alive thing in the sky, but she chose to roll down the windows instead of turning on the air conditioner and enjoy the breeze that poured through the car. She reached to turn on the car radio when her cell phone rang. She answered and it was John.
“You heading back now?” he asked. She could hear a crowd cheering sporadically in the background and John spoke loudly as to be heard above the din, but he was still barely audible.
“Yeah, I’m done.”
“You get my beer?” he asked.
“Yes, I got your beer.”
“Sweet.”
“What?”
“I said sweet.”
“Speak up. I’m driving with the windows down.”
“I said sweet,” he repeated, in an even louder tone that time.
“The game’s not over?” she asked.
“No, they’re still playing,” John said, “There are couple of innings left. It’s bottom of the seventh. Around the fifth inning the Smith boy got tagged out at second and his dad thought he got spiked by the second basemen on purpose, so he jumped up and started screaming at the other kid’s dad. The guy screamed back, then they threw their beers at each others heads and before we knew it they were tumbling down the bleachers in a brawl. They held the game up about thirty minutes trying to clean up.”
“Good grief,” Monica said, “Now you see why I don’t let you drink at Leah’s games? How is the game going anyway?”
John said, “Not bad. We’re winning. Leah has two hits. She tried to steal a base in the first inning but she got caught, so she tried again in the third and got that one. She’s happy.”
“Good.”
“Okay,” John said, “I just wanted to catch you before you got home. You get a lot of food?”
“Yeah. A ton.”
“Did it all fit in the car?” John asked, and Monica could almost see the smirk on his face through the cell phone and across the miles.
“No. I had to leave some on the parking lot.”
“Very funny. I’ll see you when we’re done here. Love you.”
“Love you too,” she said and with that she clapped the phone shut and then clipped it back to her belt and continued to drive. She turned into her neighborhood, slowing her pace for there were children playing about, and then she turned onto her street and was in front of her home. Across the street the neighbor mowed his lawn shirtless and his back was red and dripping with sweat from the unrelenting summer brightness. She waved a hand to him as she pulled into her driveway and he returned the favor with a smile and then returned to his cutting.
She stopped the car and pushed a button on the dash. The trunk popped open. She stepped from the car and adjusted her sunglasses on her face as she walked to the trunk, and she was amazed at how quickly the sweat began to pop from her forehead. She raised the trunk but her eyes were on the neighbor as he mowed his lawn. She eyed him keenly as he moved up and down his lawn in straight lines and she watched the height of the grass shorten with each pass. She was not really watching him. Instead she observed the movement of the man and the machine, the act of cutting the grass. Her mind wandered as she gazed and she felt as if she could smell his skin cooking under the harsh sun, see it grow redder with each passing second, and she silently thanked the heavens that her husband cut their grass without complaint and did not ask her to do it. She decided she would rather sit and watch the grass grow than spend an hour in the blazing sun and heat cutting it. She kept her eyes fixed across the street and reached her hand into the trunk to grab the first grocery bag.
But her hand felt nothing but chilly air. She waved both hands inside the trunk absentmindedly without turning, her eyes still on the neighbor, and again her efforts came up empty. She turned, completely bewildered, to look into the trunk but there were no groceries there. In fact there was no trunk there anymore, only a deep void of blackness that seemed to stretch perpetually like a black hole in interstellar space surrounded by the red frame of the car, and she felt a cold wind began to blow on her arms from somewhere within that darkness. She stood in shell-shocked amazement, gawking at the chasm that once was the trunk and she was too puzzled to move. Her arms were gone from the elbows down, drenched in blackness and consumed by it as if dipped into a barrel of black ink. Her eyes grew wide and she tried to draw back from the abyss, but she could not. Something held her arms tightly, something with cold, cold fingers, and it clawed at her skin.
She tried to scream but nothing came out save a gasp of horror and crazed confusion, and she began to snatch her shoulders in a frenzied attempt to free her arms. She made no progress. She heard a gurgle from somewhere within the black emptiness and then something pulled at her. She fell forward and her arms fell yet deeper into that space, just above the elbows now. She opened her mouth to scream again and for a second time nothing came forth, only another futile gasp and pants of desperation. Something pulled viciously at her arms once more, this time nearly sending her tumbling into the trunk, and she threw her knee onto the car’s bumper and braced herself. Her upper body leaned over the lip of the trunk as the cold breeze grew in its intensity until her skin felt chilled to the bone and her clothes flapped against her body.
She turned her head to her neighbor’s lawn and saw him there still mowing, now his back was to her as he made a pass up the length of his grass, and she screamed at him to turn around, turn around and look for God’ sake and help her, but those words were uttered only in her mind. Her voice again failed her, nothing but more helpless wheezing, feeble mutterings lost in the mower’s roar.
She was drawing back to attempt to yell again when she was snatched violently towards the void. She nearly lost her balance and winced as her hip smashed against the rim of the trunk, and she watched as her cell phone flew from her belt and flipped into the blackness before her. She saw it fall, and fall, and fall, until it was merely a blip of whiteness against the black and then it seemed to melt before her very eyes, dissolving like a sugar cube in hot water. Panic took her and she began to pull her restrained arms again. She placed her other knee onto the bumper to provide more leverage and again she pulled but the force in the blackness met her force equally and she gained nothing. Monica began to sob and twist her upper body, but the more force she applied the more pull she received from the thing in trunk.
Then the stalemate ended and she began to feel herself being pulled in.
The void began to expand rapidly, the coldness of it stretching out with it. She watched as tentacles of blackness slide up her arms like frozen serpents, and she saw claws stretch from them as black as the substance itself. They dug into her arms until they pierced the flesh there, and she felt the claws scrape on her bones. She panted furiously as they gouged her flesh, but she did not feel pain nor was there any blood, just an intense and ferocious frigidity that crept into her arms and seeped throughout her body until the sensation filled the spaces between muscle and the bone.
The darkness expanded more, this time outward from the trunk like a monstrous black balloon, and the area before took a shape. It grew round and protruding and then grew tall and slender, the shape of a face, and the new face opened its eyes before her, eyes of the blackest onyx ever birthed from the earth and framed in dull, throbbing red rims. Then the thing opened its mouth, and then it kept opening it, and opened it more still until the width of the thing’s maw completely obscured its horrid eyes, and Monica beheld the beast’s teeth, lines of dull reddish black teeth in rows that seemed to stretch downward forever much like the blackness of the trunk itself.
Then the beast bellowed a sound that was wholly of another world, from a place completely unknown to Monica or any other living thing. Its pitch was low with vibrations that were felt physically, and on top of that din was a shriller noise, a shriek, and both sounds melded into a sensation of sound as terrifying as the beast that birthed it. The force of the cry struck Monica’s body like sea waves smashing a reef and she felt her hair blow straight back and her clothes press tight to her body and flap riotously, mortal flags caught in the grip of an unearthly gale. Monica’s sunglasses flew from her face and disappeared behind her somewhere. A stench accompanied the wind, a smell so overpowering Monica probably would have gagged had she the air to do so, and she felt suffocated as she pulled futility at the beast’s grip on her arms. Monica began to cry as the claws dug deeper, scoring her bones, and the thing’s roar seemed to stretch out forever, bouncing off invisible walls both inside her head and inside the black abyss itself.
The bellowing of the beast finally subsided and Monica felt the air return to her. She drew in a breath to scream again, and this time her lungs exploded in an outburst of revolting terror unlike anything she had ever voiced before. Her cry vibrated her entire body, and the sound ricocheted inside her brain and even made her vision momentarily blurry from the force of it. Her head felt dizzy. She was drained and weak. The thing’s slow pull was unrelenting and she still felt her body moving steadily toward that blackness, that dimness, that cold place.
The dark mouth closed slowly before her and again she found herself staring down the coal black eyes of the thing right before her own face. The corners of its mouth began to curl upward in a sinister smile as it began to open yet again. She felt the long and cold fingers stretch more and she felt a release of pressure as the claws punched their way through the backside of her arm, the fierceness of the grip enough to puncture the limb. The frigid wind blew now like a blackened monsoon and her hair whipped wildly about her face and shoulders. In her ears there was nothing but the sound of blowing wind, her own grunting struggles, the breathing of the thing in the black. The hinged mouth was fully open again and she stared blurrily down its gaping throat at the rows and rows of teeth, and as one knee and then the other slipped from the bumper, she wondered if she would fall straight down or slowly scrape along the ranks of those teeth, teeth like sharpened and yellowed headstones in a military cemetery. Her feet were up in the air now and she felt herself falling. She closed her eyes.
A moment later a new sensation took her: the feeling of hands on her shoulders and pulling. The hands pulled her up and spun her around. She found herself staring into the sweaty face of her neighbor, his eyes wide with curiosity. She broke free from his grip and began to stumble towards the road and away from the trunk but she fell to her knees in her delirium. He picked her up.
“What the hell?” he said, “Are you all right?”
She buried her face into his shoulder and began to sob, her tears disappearing into his sweat, and he put his arm around her shoulder as she cried. “What’s going on?” he asked, “Hey, you hear me?”
Monica pulled her head away and said, “The trunk. Oh my god.” She pointed a finger but did not look. She began to shake convulsively and feared she was on the verge of hyperventilating.
“What about it?” he asked. He lifted Monica’s head up until his eyes stared directly into hers. “The trunk what?”
“The trunk,” she repeated through gasps of ragged breath, “Oh God...”
He shot a glance at the car, then at Monica, and then he released his grip on her and he began to walk toward the car. Dread flooded over her and she ran after him and called for him to stop, please god, don’t go over there. She reached out and grasped his arm but he ignored her and went to the lip of the trunk and looked inside. “What about the trunk?” he repeated.
Monica peered around his shoulder and into the trunk, and there she saw bag after bag of groceries filling the space. The blackness was gone, the hideous mouth and rows of yellow teeth removed, the onyx eyes disappeared. She stepped forward cautiously, keeping on hand one her neighbor’s arm and looked closer. Everything was as it should be. She looked at her own arms to the place where she felt the claws pierce her skin and scrape the bones, but there was nothing there save thin lines of sweat.
“I don’t...no, this...there was something there. Something was pulling me, trying to pull me in. All this was gone!” She waved her hands frantically at the trunk. Her voice grew louder with each word but she could not control it. Her neighbor grabbed her shoulders once more and held her tightly in his grip, shaking her. She did not look at him. She stared into the spot that was once infinite blackness.
“Hey, look at me, listen. Just calm down. Nothing is trying to pull you into the trunk,” he said. She began to slow her breathing, and as she wiped the sweat and tears from her face, she looked up to his face.
But his face was not there. It was replaced by the face of the thing, with its blackened eyes, gaping maw and deep dark. The grip on her shoulders was cold again and once more she felt those revolting nails dig into her flesh. The neighborhood was gone as well, no more houses, no more trees, no more anything but dark, and it was all encompassing and seemed to swallow the world.
“You’re already in the trunk,” the thing said in its unearthly voice, and then a small smile flashed on its face as it opened its hideous mouth. Monica tried to scream and her voice failed her as before, this time not so much as a feeble gasp sounded. She heard the beast roar, felt the rush of frigid, stinking air blow her hair and clothing back, and she saw its open mouth moving for her. A moment later, she heard no more and saw no more and was left only with the wintriness of that place that stretched out indefinitely into forever.
