Don't

“Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango?”

    The box just sat there like a silent accusation. The bozo who left it in the passenger seat was long gone in the labyrinth of cars in the parking lot. Kat took a long drag from her electronic cigarette, willing Connie to hurry up with her shopping. If only the windows weren’t busted, she’d be inside the store with the AC turning her into ice and her glasses into fog, instead of out here baking like a lesbian cream pie.

“Thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightening me!”

    Somebody just turned out the sun. Total darkness never seemed so...total. But what was that? Light.  Light from the box! Fear, excitement, curiosity, apprehension and bewilderment coalesced in the pit of her stomach. She absently dragged on her ecig again. As the vapors met with the light, colors and shapes came into life. Rainbow light filled the car, flashing psychedelic auroras, banishing the darkness beyond the open windows. Prancing purple unicorns, operatic green tigers, solemn orange hyenas and mathematical chartreuse guinea pigs spouting the secrets of the universe vied for her attention. They kept on coming, leaking from the sides of the box’s lid. She reached out a shaking hand to open the box, not wanting to do it, but unable to resist all the same.

“‘Bismillah! No, we will not let him go!’ ‘Let him go!’”

    Something slammed on the other side of her door. Impossible as it is, shadows were moving in the darkness, whispering things unintelligible and barely audible. Dark, shapeless, hulking things, blacker than the blackness blanketing everything around her. She cringed away, the transmission stick digging in the small of her back. From beyond the dark, a small pinprick of light began to glow. The whisperings were starting to get louder, more frantic. The glow came closer, inch by inch, looking more and more like eyes...

    “ROOOOOAAAAARRRR!!!!” The tiger growled in her ear, startling her. The psychedelic vapors were agitated. All were trying to open the box’s lid, but they can’t. Another slam came at the door, this one stronger than the last. Then something slammed at it again, and again, and again. Hands began to reach in from the outside. Disembodied shadows looking as insubstantial as the aurora figures began to tear at her. They caught her hair, her blouse. Dark talons left long angry scratches on nearly every patch of exposed skin she had. She screamed in silence, the only sound in the world came from the terrified auroras and the sinister darkness. “Come... with... us... You... are...” Kat couldn’t take it anymore. She reached out and opened the box.

“Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me...”

    “Oh, great! Now where the hell is she?”

    Connie got in the driver’s seat, irritated that Kat had gone off in one of her random walks again. She noticed the box but thought nothing of it. Under the seat, a pair of broken glasses sat abandoned.