Gosh, it must have been… well, it was after Christmas but it was still cold, so I guess early 2009? If you had asked me at the time, I would have guessed the Lehman Brothers were actors, or maybe some kind of Mario rip-off. I had no idea what was going on, but what I did know was that there were a lot of abandoned houses in my neighborhood; irresistible for a troublemaking kid like myself to explore. In retrospect, letting an 11 year old girl wander around abandoned McMansions with a hoodie, a flashlight, light-up sneakers, and one of those hollow metal baseball bats probably wasn’t the best idea in the world, but I didn’t know any better, and my parents weren’t exactly present.

Most of these houses were pretty nondescript: graffiti, broken furniture and windows, dust and mold, creaky floors, ticky-tacky walls. There was one, though, that caught my eye, because it didn’t have those things. In fact, I didn’t think it was abandoned for a long time, because no one came in and vandalized it. Red flag number 1. On the outside, it was a pretty normal house, so I didn’t really understand why people left it alone. One weekend - once I was sure nobody lived there - I went in through the back. Inside, it was remarkably put together.

Downstairs didn’t have much out of the ordinary. Dusty, mildewy. Upstairs didn’t either, for the most part. The bed was still there, but it was nasty, so I didn’t touch it. There was one room, however, that someone has blocked off with a bookshelf. Red flag number 2. Of course, that sparked my curiosity, and so I mustered all my strength and managed to move the shelf, somehow. I opened the door into what looked like some kind of home office, or study. Mostly untouched, although the previous owner had taken most of their books with them.

On the big desk in the middle of the room, though, lay what the red flags were warning about: an ornate box, about 6 inches on each side. It was a glossy black, and to the touch it felt, enameled, I guess? The most striking feature was an iridescent pattern on the vertical sides that closely resembled the cosmic microwave background radiation, of all things (I knew it because I had read a lot of astronomy books for kids around that time). Of course, I was going to open it. And that’s when things got weird.

I don’t think I could ever properly describe what happened when I opened the box. This isn’t entirely anatomically correct, but you can imagine a flat 2D layer of nerves under your skin. You can feel when things touch your skin, right? Now, imagine that layer of nerves becomes 3D. Extending probably 6 feet in every direction, I could… feel things, as if I was touching them. But not just the surface, but every part of them, inside and out (thankfully, this didn’t extend inwards to myself). I could feel the scratchy interior of the floorboards, the spiny insulation in the walls, the smooth and cold pipes for water and sewage, the cables for power and internet, the dust on the surfaces, the mold and mildew building inside drawers. I could feel how the temperature changed in different areas of the room. I could feel every part of that box inside and out. For some reason, it was empty, but the space inside was warm. It was a torrent of information my brain could not process properly. I froze up, completely overwhelmed by the new sensations.

After some time, I slowly came to my senses (so to speak). It was still overwhelming, but I began to think about what I was feeling, trying to adapt to my new… ability, I guess. I tried to link what I was feeling to what I was seeing, trying to get associate my new touch ability with where things were in the world. I felt what I think were rats moving through the ceiling; I’ll spare you the details on what that was like.

Then, I felt something I couldn’t identify. That I couldn’t see. It was… segmented, into many smooth parts. It had 4, or maybe 5 (I wasn’t able to really count the things I was feeling yet) long parts, and then a larger, central part. The inside(?) of it was cold, and slimy. Now, maybe your first thought was “spider”, or something like that, but this thing was big. Like, maybe the size of a go-kart? That’s just what it felt like, though, things often feel larger to the touch than they actually are, but I still maintain that it was big. Some kind of… fluid, ran through it. It was cold, but not viscous, like water. And this thing moved. It was walking… around me. Walking on the floor. It moved slowly and deliberately, I think. I was petrified, of whatever this thing was that was near me. And then, another one entered my, uh, field of touch. This time on the ceiling. It walked across the ceiling and then out of… touch.

I quickly went to close the box, and the sensation stopped. Thank god. I don’t know what I would have done if it didn’t stop. I was already getting a headache. I stood there, heart beating out of my chest, kind of just, processing what just happened, and deliberating on what to do with the box. I eventually decided to take it with me, carrying it very carefully as to not let it open again. I’m not sure why I took it, but I think my kid brain thought that if I knew where it was, nobody else could find it and open it, and experience what I did - and more importantly, let those spider things loose. It’s not actually a terrible idea. When I got home, I wrapped the whole thing in duct tape and hid it in the corner of my closet. I didn’t sleep well that night, I’ll tell you that for free.

I still have the box. I have since cast the whole thing in a block of resin, and hid it somewhere in my house, although I’m not telling anyone where. As a kid, I told myself that the spider things live in the box, and that so long as the box stays closed, they aren’t out in the world. I still tell myself that, because I don’t want to live in a world where I am wrong.