17 Feb The Chalk Box

There was something in the old safe. That was all I knew for sure. We’d tilted it carefully and heard something sizable sliding around. The safe itself was one of those classic home wall cubes, big enough to hold something a foot in every dimension. It could have had a couple of gold bars, or a binder of rare stamps, or something else amazing.

It was a lot more likely that it held a giant pile of moldering documents wrapped together by the ragged remnants of long-dead rubber bands. That’s usually what was in these, when they weren’t entirely empty. Even those documents were sometimes worth something to somebody, though. That’s an awful lot of equivocation, but that’s just the nature of the game.

Buying sealed safes to get rich is like playing the lottery as a retirement plan. It’s just not going to work out. Admit that you’re in it for the thrill of what-if, and you can have a good time. Convince yourself that it’s going to pay off, and you’re in for constant disappointment.

Like I said, I’ve always been in it for the game. I like buying sealed things. Storage lockers, mystery pallets, safes—it’s all the same to me. I like safes the best when I can find them, because they take the longest to open, which gives you the most time to pretend that you’re going to get fabulously rich. Storage lockers aren’t bad because there’s usually so much to sort through, but they can end up getting tedious and boring by the end. Safes have a big anticipatory build-up while you’re drilling, followed by instant gratification.

All I knew about this safe was that it had been found in a ruined house. The seller stressed how utterly ruined the house was.

“I just want you to know that there was no way anyone was coming back for this,” he told me. “Like, there weren’t two walls left standing in this place. It was like a giant came and stepped on it. I think it must’ve been hit by a tornado or a gas explosion or something. I’ll be honest, man, I thought I was gonna find a body in there.”

“You didn’t, right?”

“Yeah, it was empty! I carted out all of the appliances for scrap, so I went through it pretty well. Must’ve been no one home when it happened.”

“Little weird that they never came back at all,” I said.

He shrugged. “Man, you wouldn’t believe how much abandoned stuff there is. People just leave things all the time. For all sorts of reasons. I swear, sometimes they just forget to come back. Out of sight, out of mind.”

A house didn’t really seem like the sort of thing one could forget owning, but I was willing to take the seller’s word for it. After all, I did want the safe.

I gave him his cash, we wrestled it into my car together, and I drove home dreaming of riches. Maybe the house being torn apart hadn’t been an accident. Maybe whoever had demolished it had been looking for whatever was in the safe. They hadn’t found it because the safe was super well hidden, and the homeowner hadn’t told them where it was because—

I didn’t like the implications of that daydream. I started over.

Maybe the guy had a meth lab in his basement. He’d kept everything valuable in the safe because he knew the risk, and sure enough, one day, while he was out buying more cold medicine or whatever, the whole thing blew sky high. When he came back, the police were all over the area, and they hucked him in jail for the rest of his life for getting folks addicted and ruining their lives.

There. A much better story, one in which the guy deserved to lose his stuff. It was still questionable whether I deserved to get it, but the hundred-dollar bill I gave to the seller said it was mine now.

A guy like that would probably have big bricks of money in the safe, like you see filling briefcases in the movies. They might make the noise I’d heard sliding around.

As I drilled into the safe that night, I tried to figure out how many hundred-dollar bills could fit inside. Twenty stacks of fifty bills seemed pretty reasonable, and that was a million dollars. I wouldn’t mind having a million bucks.

I was figuring out how I would spend that without raising questions when the drill finally went all the way through the lock. I held my breath as I pried the door open. It probably wasn’t a million dollars, of course. It might be half a million. Heck, I’d be pretty happy even with two stacks of ones. That would still be break-even on my money.

Inside the safe was a leather satchel, worn and stained. It had a broken clasp on the front. I lifted the lid to see twenty carefully sorted sticks of colored chalk, each with an individual separator.

The rest of the safe was empty. I turned the satchel over and searched it for hidden compartments, but there were none. I tested the chalk on the garage floor, and it made a line just like chalk should. I touched a stick to my tongue in case it was secretly drugs, but either it wasn’t, or drugs taste just like chalk.

Apparently, the previous owner had not been a meth kingpin. Possibly, he had been an art teacher.

With my dreams of being a millionaire shattered, I retreated to my house and poured myself a consolatory glass of champagne. I always had a bottle on hand for these occasions in case I found something worth celebrating. Even though I hadn’t yet, it was a pretty good excuse to enjoy a bottle of champagne. It was all part of the ritual.

I slept well that night, no doubt thanks to the soporific effects of downing a bottle of champagne by myself. I didn’t realize exactly how soundly I had slept until the next afternoon, when I went out to the garage to fetch a tool and discovered that the interior had been vandalized.

I had heard nothing at all. And it was strange; from a hurried inventory, nothing seemed to be missing. Someone had clearly been in there, though. They had opened up the weathered leather chalk box and used the sticks to draw what was frankly a very good picture of my house.

It covered the majority of the cement floor of the garage. The detail was amazing. They had every plank of siding drawn parallel to the next, every corner made perfectly square. I don’t think I could have gotten all of the roof angles in the correct places without having a picture in front of me, and I’d lived here for years.

There was no reason that they couldn’t have had a picture in front of them, of course. It just seemed weirder somehow. I don’t know why breaking into a place to draw a picture of it on the floor is less strange than breaking into that place to draw a picture while also already having a picture, but it is.

The garage door was still locked, which didn’t make me feel better. It only meant that they’d come in through the house. It was possible that they were still here, hiding somewhere and waiting for me to leave so they could clean me out.

I grabbed an aluminum baseball bat and went on a slow tour, looking under every bed and poking into every closet. I found no one.

The main doors were locked as well, as was every window I tried. They must have left and—locked up behind themselves? That didn’t make much sense, but nothing about this break-in seemed reasonable. They hadn’t taken anything. They hadn’t made any noise. They’d just done some sort of odd dollhouse art and left.

An idea struck me. What if I had done it? After finishing the champagne I’d gone to bed, I was sure of that. But what if I’d gotten up in some kind of drunken stupor and….

I couldn’t even finish the thought. Gotten drunk and done an architecturally perfect drawing with sidewalk chalk? The idea wasn’t just stupid, it was fully impossible. I went back out to the garage to replace the bat, shaking my head at myself. Some kids had gotten in and played a dumb prank. Talented kids, but talented and troublemaking often went hand in hand. There were a bunch of possible culprits in the area. Whoever it was just needed something more constructive to do with their time.

As I leaned the bat back up against the wall, I marveled again at the precision in the drawing. The bricks were drawn in individually. The bent gutter that I’d been meaning to fix had its unsightly bulge in the correct place. I bet that if I went behind the sunroom and counted the branches on the tree, I’d find that the ones in the drawing matched perfectly.

I froze. There hadn’t been a tree in the drawing before. I was sure of it. It had just been the house.

It was there now, though, the big oak that shaded most of the backyard. It loomed over the sunroom, leaves casting their filtered pastel green light onto the structure below.

My structure. My house.

Someone was playing games with me.

I grabbed the bat and pointed it threateningly into the garage.

“Still in here, huh?” I called. I banged the bat against the cement floor. It made a satisfying ringing sound. “Come out right now and we can still talk this out. If I have to drag you out, I will soften you up with this bat first.”

There was no response.

“Last chance.”

Silence.

“All right.”

I made my way carefully around the garage. It was decently well organized, but things had piled up in a few places. There was a stack of cardboard boxes in one corner that were supposed to be empty. I swatted them with the bat just in case someone was hiding there. The boxes crumpled and fell, revealing no one. Still, I smiled as I pictured my scared intruder cringing in his corner, watching me swing the bat.

They were tough, whoever they were. They didn’t come out. And though I searched the entire garage, I could not find them.

I was mad. This was my house. They broke in, taunted me with vandalism, and were now just going to hide?

I decided it was about time to make my mystery person mad, too.

“Fine. You just want to hide and watch?” I pulled a rag off of my workbench and threw it onto the floor. “Watch this.”

I dragged it across a swath of the chalk drawing with my foot, erasing a giant swath of the sunroom and the tree behind it.

I don’t know exactly what I thought was going to happen. I figured they had probably wanted me to be impressed, to take pictures, to call people to come look at the art. It had to have taken hours to create, after all. I thought there’d be some sort of a reaction to having it destroyed.

What I didn’t expect was the apocalyptic boom that shook the entire house. I jumped so hard that I dropped the bat. All around me, tools fell from the walls and cans tumbled from shelves, adding to the cacophony. It felt like the house had been hit by a rocket.

I’d like to say that I ran to see what had happened. The truth is that I simply ran. The terror flooding my body insisted that I needed to be anywhere else, and I heeded that primal instinct. I burst back into the kitchen, then stopped dead as I saw what had happened.

I could see leaves in my house. Past the hallway, the entire sunroom was taken up with a mass of spreading branches. Shattered glass glittered across the floor beneath them, its shine dulled by the settling cloud of insulation and drywall dust.

The sunroom’s ceiling was gone, destroyed by that giant oak that had shaded it for so long. It had fallen on my house like divine judgment, utterly obliterating the room beneath it.

My hammering heart gradually slowed back to a more normal pace as I processed this. It had just been a terrifying accident. The house was not under attack. I was still in a normal suburban world. This was going to be expensive and annoying, but fine.

The funny thing was that that chalk drawing might have saved my life. The garage was the farthest part of the house from the sunroom. I could see fallen pictures and broken windows everywhere. Bits of broken objects littered the entire house. I’d been in the safest place to be when it happened.

I wandered back out to the garage, trying to figure out who to call about this. The police seemed unnecessary. An arborist, maybe? My insurance, certainly. They were probably a good first call. They dealt with this sort of thing and could help me with the next steps.

I glanced down at the drawing and felt a slight shiver. My rag still lay at the end of its destructive sweep, where it had carved a path through the tree and the sunroom. The tree that had now fallen, and the sunroom that was now demolished. It was only a coincidence, surely, but a creepy one.

Then I noticed a new piece of the drawing that, again, I swore had not been there before. There was a black SUV parked outside. I peeked out through the windows in the garage door, and sure enough, the vehicle shown was pulled up to my curb. In the drawing, it looked vaguely sinister, but in real life, I could see the pony-tailed woman inside talking on her cell phone. She probably had children in the backseat, and was coordinating a pickup or dropoff. It was about as nonthreatening as you could get.

I shouldn’t have done it. I knew that even at the time, but I told myself it was ridiculous. I wanted to prove that it was just a drawing.

I erased the car.

I ran back to the windows. The car was still there. The woman was still on her phone.

I was halfway through an exhalation of amused relief when the other truck came speeding around the corner, jumped the curb and cannonballed directly into the side of her car.

Metal screamed. Both cars were flung in opposite directions, rolling over and over. I ran for the switch to open the door, to go out and help. At the last second, I turned my run into an ungainly leap and saw with horror that I was about to step on the drawing of my house.

I landed in a painful heap. The cardboard boxes broke my fall, but they slid and slipped as I attempted to stand. I was terrified of accidentally erasing another piece of the picture with an errant square of cardboard.

By the time I finally made it to my feet, I could hear shouting from outside. People were there helping the accident victims. That meant I wasn’t needed, and could work on the more important task: preserving the picture.

Obviously, erasing it was ruinous. I had polyurethane, though. I could fix it in place. Nothing else would get wiped away, and it would probably also stop pieces being added, at the very least, until it dried.

The can was on the floor, having fallen in a pile with the rest of its shelf when the tree hit the house. The pungent chemical smell suggested at least one of them was leaking. That was a secondary problem I could deal with after I had fixed the chalk, though—or so I thought until I reached for the can of polyurethane and the entire pile burst into flames.

I keep the fire extinguisher in my garage up to date. Chemical fire or no, it should have been able to suppress it easily. I emptied the entire canister onto the flames to no avail. The fire simply grew.

I backed away from the choking fumes, looking for a thick blanket to smother the conflagration before it grew much larger. It was then that I noticed that the garage portion of the house had changed. It was a cutaway now, showing the room from the inside. The details were vaguely implied, but the fire in the corner was unmistakable.

I took a chance. I licked my thumb and smudged out the fire.

Across the room, the fire instantly vanished. Where it had been, though, the materials were melted and fused together. It could have been the effect of a fire hot and dangerous enough to resist being choked out by an extinguisher. But it looked like someone had just smeared everything there together, smushing metal and rock and wood as if they were all putty.

Or chalk.

The polyurethane was out, but I still had other things that could cover this. I had some sheets of plexiglass. They would work well enough.

As I started over toward them, I could hear the smoke alarm in the house go off. I ignored it at first, thinking that the smoke from the garage fire had just gotten inside, but then I noticed the new cutaway diagram of the living room and the fire climbing the wall to consume the television.

I dropped the plexiglass and hurriedly wiped away the fire. In my haste, I wiped away one of the lines of the ceiling. I heard a thunderous crash from the house.

I did not need to picture what had just happened. It was drawn directly in front of me.

Drawing! If I locked the chalk back up, nothing new could be added to the drawing. Then I’d be safe to cover it without fear of fires or lightning or whatever else it could add.

I grabbed the leather box and peeked inside. To my dismay, it was completely empty. All twenty pieces of chalk were gone.

I could see one lying on the floor, though. The red chalk, one of the colors in the fires. It was half under a bench as if caught in the act of trying to hide.

I crept toward it as if I were sneaking up on a wild animal. I reached carefully for it, then snatched it up before it could flee.

It did not move. It did not react. It lay there exactly as a stick of chalk would.

I shoved it back into the case and turned to look for others. I stepped in a puddle of something seeping, oozing toward the drawing.

“No!” I yelled. “No, no, no!”

I could see where the floor of the garage had been colored black. Using my body to shield the drawing, I grabbed the rag and removed the new chalk as carefully as I could. I felt the ooze disappear. I did not destroy the garage around myself. The floor is now blurry and unsettling to look at, but that’s fine. I don’t have time to look around much.

Every time I look away, they add something new, some new disaster to deal with. Or worse, take something away. It’s hard to remember where every support line in a structure is. I have only moments to find and draw them back in before they take effect in the real world and I hear another part of my house collapse.

For a while, I thought I might win. By looking away and then back quickly enough, I was able to catch several more pieces of the chalk. It took hours and most of my house, but I got eleven of them back into the box. The latch is broken, but I’ve kept my hand on the lid, and that seems to be enough to keep them in.

Eleven is pretty good. It’s more than half.

It’s nowhere near enough.

The other nine still plague me, adding and erasing things, cutting my house away a piece at a time. I can’t imagine what the neighbors think. I heard banging on the door a while ago, and what sounded like someone trying to get in the sunroom, but then part of the attic collapsed, and I think they headed back to safety.

I thought about just making a run for it, but it isn’t just my house anymore. There’s a diagram of me on the floor as well, an unpleasantly clear chalk outline. I caught the piece that drew that, and the others haven’t done anything to it yet. I don’t think anything is stopping them, though.

It’s nighttime. The power is out from some piece of the damage. I have flashlights in here, but getting them to cover the whole diagram at once is hard. And I’m getting tired. I don’t know how much longer I can keep up this exhausting game.

My eyes keep flicking to the drawing of myself. I think about the ruined house the seller found this safe in, and his insistence that there was no one there in the rubble.

There are only nine pieces of chalk to go. Maybe I can still get them.

If it gets too bad, though, maybe taking out that drawing of myself in one quick swipe won’t be so bad.

I’m sorry for whoever finds this chalk in the wreckage.