The Box Has Twelve Sides: Thirteen Curious Tales to Delight and Disturb

FRIENDLY VARMINT

THE SWAMP BEHIND THE shack was lit up like an Independence Day's wet dream. There were more balls of light and rocket trails than you could shake a stick at. All colors, too: reds and blues and greens and... Well, there were a few colors mixed in here and there which just didn't have a name. It was almost as if a blind oil painter had gotten a notion of what certain colors should feel like, and went with that, just hoping the viewer would understand what he was shooting for.

Old Man Jacks was standing on the back porch of his two room cabin, watching the way the colors lighted up the trees and swamp moss, following the few random sparks as they rode upwards on currents of air. He wasn't worried about them falling back down to earth and catching something on fire; his little plot of land was pretty much surrounded by the swampy water. There was only the one rickety bridge leading in and out from his place and, quite frankly, he didn't care whether it burnt to the ground or not.

He was perfectly happy in his solitude. At least as happy as an old widower could be. Childless, too, he thought. Only it wasn't always that way.

Another plume shot skyward, ricocheting around in the treetops. He could see the source of all the ruckus, about a hundred yards from his house, an object in the middle of the swamp, most likely sinking to the muddy bottom. The fireworks were getting steadily weaker and less frequent.

He looked at his watch. Two-thirty in the goddamn morning, he thought. Well, it's not like I was asleep or anything.

Jacks had been sitting in his armchair when the... thing flew right over his house. It was close enough to the ground that the doors shook and the dirty dishes rattled in the sink. But it was silent. In fact, it didn't make a sound until it hit the trees leading into the marsh, just past his house. So the disturbance he felt was only the air being pushed out of the way as the thing barely avoided turning his shack into matchsticks.

As soon as it finished making splinters from the old Cyprus trees and splashed into the swamp, Jacks switched on the end table light (yes, he'd been sitting there in the dark) and made his way to the back door. He could see the glow from the flames and sparks peeking through the cracks in the door.

Watching the dying light, Jacks figured to himself that maybe he should go take a look at whatever had just made an unwelcomed intrusion on his property. He was in no hurry. Most likely it was a meteorite or a piece of an old satellite. He fleetingly thought that it could have also been a small airplane, but quickly dismissed the notion; he lived way too far off the beaten path for that.

He pulled on his boots, picked his light jacket off the floor next to the door where he'd dropped it, and started back out. Hold on, he thought. May as well take the Remington, just in case.

Just in case of what, he did not know.

It was a relatively short walk to the dwindling light in the swamp. Jacks knew where to step and where not to step. He wasn't about to take a fall into a swamp pit or step off into the black water. He didn't need a flashlight either, as the nearly full moon and years of wandering these trails were his guides. But it was a circuitous route, taking him twice as long to get there.

As he approached the source of all this consternation, it was apparent to Jacks there was something a little out of the ordinary. It took him a minute for his eyes to understand what he was looking at. A little out of the world is more like it, he thought.

It was definitely a ship of some sort. About a third of it was still sticking out of the swampy water at a severe angle, and it was sinking gradually. Some say there aren't really bottoms to the old swamps of backwoods Louisiana, Jacks thought. Well, if there are, this thing's gonna find it. And if there aren't, it may just sink right to the other side of the world. Jacks considered himself a philosopher of sorts, having seen enough pain and sorrow for a lifetime.