Apex Book Company

* Names have been changed to protect the urinaters, since ‘Andy’ threw a fit that I told the whole world he peed on the side of the road. Some people are so touchy. *

It’s been several years now since my buddy Andy told me about the homemade shack he’d seen in the woods. We were heading up to New Hampshire so he could visit a specialty motorcycle shop, and I was along for the ride. It was a sunny day and I had the window down as we cruised along a stretch of highway, scenically lacking in civilization.  The road was lined on either side with a canopy of plush trees, full with summer leaves.

Andy pointed at the passing wall of wooded green. “You can’t see it because it’s further up in the woods,” he said, “but some guy built a weird little shack out there. I think he lives in it.”

I was sure he was full of crap. It wouldn’t have been the first time. He once tried to convince me he’d discovered a mummy in the basement of his college dorm, which miraculously ended up being a long lost relative of his. So needless to say, I believed very little of what Andy told me. But this turned out to be one of those rare, “boy who cried wolf” times that he was actually serious.

He claimed he’d stopped for an ‘emergency piss’ and wandered into the woods for fear he’d be spotted by a passing cop, then stumbled upon a homemade shack made from wood scraps and plastic bags. Curiosity getting the better of him, he crawled inside the little hut to look around, where he found remains of a recently consumed meal, a tiny gas heater, items of men’s clothing and a candle. Now I’m not sure that this next part wasn’t added to give the story dramatic suspense, but he claimed the inside of the hut was warm, like the tiny heater had been recently active. So he left, scared of being discovered by whatever vagrant occupied the little shamble.

I dismissed the story with a “yeah, okay, whatever,” thinking the mystery shack concocted less of cardboard and more of Andy’s imagination. Until three weeks later when I got a frantic phone call from Andy in his car.

“You’re not going to believe this. I’m with Mark. We were going up to the bike shop to return some stuff, so I stopped to show him the shack. The guy is there!”

“What guy?” I asked.

“The guy!” he said. “The man in the box.”

The man in the box. That did it. My writer’s brain saw those five words printed on a title page, and I cursed, knowing I was about to jump off another cliff after my friend, and probably land in a big pile of shit.

“Is he homeless? Is he weird? How old is he? Do you think he’s dangerous?”

“No idea,” Andy said. “We were on our way through the trees when I saw him crawl inside. He looked a little dirty, but pretty normal.”

“Did he see you guys?”

“I don’t think so. We turned around and came back to the car. I just had to tell you.”

“Stay there, I’m coming up,” I said.

“What? Why?”

“Because I want to talk to that guy, and I’m not going up there alone.”

After a few minutes of bitching that he had things to do that day, Andy finally agreed to stay there with Mark until I arrived. I grabbed my little tape recorder, praying the man in the box would still be there when I arrived—and that he wasn’t a crazed psychopath who wanted to make a lamp out of my uterus. But just in case, I grabbed my pepper spray on the way out the door.

When the three of us approached the shack, we weren’t sure if the man was inside. I knew we’d find out soon enough, as our approach was not quiet. In their nervousness, Mark and Andy giggled, and in my nervousness, I repeatedly whispered for them to “SHUT UP!”

Then, just as I’d suspected, the man stepped out of the shack to see what the racket was. His clothing was standard camp wear, canvas pants, boots, and a T-shirt. His hair was short, corporate styled despite a layer of dust.

But something wasn’t right about him…something about his eyes. They were rimmed red and glazed, like he was having trouble focusing. If he were a cartoon, he would have had those little spirals circling around his pupils.

“Hello,” Andy said, still muffling giggles.

“You’re trespassing,” the man said. His voice was firm, yet calm. “I know there aren’t any signs posted, but this is my property. It runs back four acres from that point over there.” He pointed to some unmarked spot back the way we came.

I tried to assess his age and came in somewhere around forty. He was well spoken, but seemed disoriented. I suppose he hadn’t been expecting company. For all he knew, we were the ones wanting to make balloon animals out of his flesh.

Andy went into diplomacy mode, explaining that we meant no harm, and how he’d stumbled across the shack in the past, and was merely curious about it.

The man glanced back at his little structure then looked at us.

“What were you doing up here?” he asked.

Andy told him he’d stopped off the road to relieve himself. The man stared off in the direction of the roadway, his face pinched. “I hate to have to put signs up,” he grumbled. “It ruins the beauty of the land to post signs everywhere, but if people are going to just start walking up from the road…”

Andy apologized and told the man that we were just leaving. I wanted to kick him. The guy turned to crawl back into his shack. I wasn’t having it.

“Do you live in there?” I asked.

He paused. “Of course not. I own an old colonial about a mile off. This is just a project.”

“What kind of project?” I pushed.

Andy and Mark stood behind me, waiting to see if I was going to send the stranger into a rage with my probing questions. But the guy grinned.

“Well, I could explain it, but you wouldn’t understand. It’ll sound nuts.”

He’d said the magic words. I knew insanity had to come into this eventually. A grown man who owned a big expensive house with acres of land did not sit around in a childishly built wood shack for any logical reason.

“Try me,” I said.

He made a second attempt to shoo us off his property. I pleaded, flashed my tape recorder and told him I was a writer, and that exploring unusual people was a bit of a hobby. I assured him I’d heard many a strange tale, and doubted anything he could tell me would shock. Andy and Mark backed me up, loyally offering that I too was a bit touched in the head. After several minutes of banter about my psychological state, the man in the box invited us in.

We each pulled up a dirty floorboard and sat in a semi-circle inside the dusty wooden scrap hut. The man introduced himself as Dale and said he owned his own business, which tended to produce a load of stress. Dale found stress affecting him in many ways; his temper, his personality, his relationships, and his health. He realized a few years back that he was all-consumed with running the business, and rarely thought of or did anything else. That’s when he started the shack project.

“I run my own business too,” Andy offered. “But I deal with stress by having a couple of beers when I get home.”

Dale smiled at Andy and shook his head, with that look people get when they’re about to drop pearls of wisdom on your naïve, unenlightened head.

Andy and I exchanged a glance. We both thought we knew where this was going. This Dale character had created a Thoreau style environment to bring him back to nature, combat the rat race and all that hippie bullshit. In essence we were right, but we were about to learn that Dale took the self-exploration to a whole other level.

“Beers at the end of the day,” Dale said, nodding. “If that works for you, cool. Me, I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy altering my consciousness by other means.”

A fat summer bug flew into the shack, smacked into the back wall and frantically buzzed around. Andy, Mark, and I barely glanced at it, but Dale got a strange, dopey grin.

“Beetle beetle beetle,” he said. “Get out of my house, beetle!”

I looked over at Mark, who raised a wary eyebrow.

Dale’s eyes followed the flight of the insect, entranced. “Beetle beetle beetle,” he repeated. “Why don’t you listen to me? You weren’t invited, beetle!”

I knew if Andy looked my way, I’d lose my composure, so I avoided his eyes. Instead, I looked directly at Dale.

He grinned. “Can you see that beetle? Because I’m on hour forty-seven. This is about the time I start hallucinating a little.”

I frowned. “Hour forty-seven. What does that mean?”

“Sleep deprivation. I come out to this shack once a year, when I feel myself getting to that point where work’s taken over my head. I spend three days out here with no sleep. Total deprivation. When I go back home, I sleep for a day or so, and then I go back to my life, a new man.”

I’d experienced the effects of sleep deprivation only once, and that was after a twenty-four hour stretch of partying after graduating high school. I’d had a few fleeting hallucinations that morning before I hit the sack. But this guy claimed to be on hour forty-seven with no sleep.

“Whoa,” Mark said. “Your brain must be whacked right now.”

Dale giggled. “Actually, it hasn’t fully kicked in yet. By nightfall I’ll be in the zone. By day three, I can barely think straight. I’m married, so my wife comes out to get me at the end of the third day, and walks me home. Otherwise who knows where I’d end up?”

“How do you keep yourself awake?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Will power. Lack of comforts. I just force myself to do it.”

Andy spoke up. “Now wait a minute. How does this purge you of stress? I don’t get it. Sleep deprivation makes me crankier.”

Sitting cross-legged, Dale turned his strange gaze on Andy. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

“Then explain it,” I said, afraid the guy was going to clam up.

He looked around the shack. “Okay, there’s always a certain point, usually at hour fifty-five or so, when it starts to happen. It’s like everything out here, the trees, the bugs, the ground, it all starts talking to me.”

“Talking to you…” I repeated.

At that moment, Mark lost it. Frankly, I was amazed he’d held it together for as long as he did. Unlike Dale, Mark was no stranger to drugs, and had apparently smoked a joint on the ride up. I felt for him. I was barely keeping a straight face, and I was toxin-free.

Dale turned to Mark, who’d now sent Andy off into a fit of giggles. I was afraid Dale would be mad, but he laughed too. “Are you guys really here?” he asked, which set them off worse.

Sensing that we might be on the cusp of a fruity nut case breakthrough, I tried to lead Dale back to his original thought. “So you were saying these things in the woods talk to you.”

Dale grabbed a cardboard box, dragging it toward him. He pulled three tattered notebooks out. “I write it down. At least some of it. When I’m in that place where it all starts to speak, I write it down. I read it a week later, after I’ve slept and I’m back at work. I find messages in it. I know it sounds crazy, but reading this stuff later keeps things in focus.”

“So it’s the flow of your subconscious,” I said.

I thought my statement would validate Dale, let him know I understood and was hip to what he was doing. I was down with his sickness.

But the comment pissed him off. He frowned at me and pointed to the notebooks on his lap. “This is not some stream of consciousness that came from my brain. The bugs and the trees actually talk to me. Because I come out here and sacrifice my body and mind to the forest. This is my temple where I come to worship them. They understand that, so they share their wisdom with me.”

I bit my lip and nodded, afraid to even glance at my friends.

But then Andy leaned in to me. “I think he’s peaking.”

That was all it took. I let out a snorting laugh. Dale scowled. Sensing he was becoming irritated with us, I decided to wrap things up. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what hour forty-eight would bring. He was loopy enough as it was.

“Thanks for talking to us, Dale. I really appreciate it.” I hit the rewind button on my little tape recorder.

Dale looked down at the device. “Hey, can I keep that tape? I’d love to have a recording of one of my trips. I’ve never done that before.”

I told him I needed the tape to reference direct quotes. He looked terribly disappointed so I made a deal with him. If he gave me a passage from one of his ‘in the zone’ notebooks, I’d send him a copy of my write up from our visit. At first he was reluctant. Finally, he agreed, and wrote his address on a small scrap of paper torn from the notebook. After another grueling fifteen minutes of perusing his notebooks for just the right passage, he tore out a hand-written page and gave it to me. “This was from day three, last year,” he said. “It was a magical night for sure.”

We left Dale to his deprivation. As far as the passage he gave me, all I can say is it must have been a magical evening indeed.

‘My poison in your veins, your blood in my mouth. Yes, yes yes. How could I be so dumb? Dumb and blind. Mosquito talking to me as he looks around my temple. Not a predator, a partner, a give and take, a trade, to get to know each other. He needed to give me his poison so I could know his mind, hear his thoughts, and he could speak to me. He needed to drink my blood so he could hear my thoughts, understand my words, and I could speak to him. We are connected now, the mosquito and I, his poison in my veins, my blood in his mouth. Bumpy bumpy lumpies on my skin from your poison kiss!’

Yeah. I doubt I’ll ever return to visit the man in the box, but if I do, I’m bringing Thorazine.  And a big can of Raid.

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.