The Devil's Toy Box
Let me tell you, I had never dappled into the paranormal, I consider myself an atheist and a non-believer of anything that cannot be explained without reasoning first. However, my roommate, Jarrett, was completely the opposite; he was a fanatic of the supernatural. His room was littered with books about aliens, ghosts, and anything else that was out of the ordinary. Jarrett even had the entire collection of the X-Files on DVD—including all of the movies. He was one of those people that believed the government covered up the Roswell incident way back in 1947, and believed all of the ghost stories and strange incidents he would hear on the radio or saw on the TV. One day he made the decision that he wanted to be a part of one of those ghost stories he heard and watched from the media. He became a part of one of those stories told all right, and I am a witness to those strange occurrences that happened in our apartment. What happened in our apartment that year changed my perception on the unexplained forever, and I urge you to never experiment in the Devil’s Toy Box like Jarrett did. No one knew what the toy box was fully capable of doing, but it changed the course of my life forever, and ultimately, it changed Jarrett’s, too.
The first time Jarrett told me about the Devil’s Toy Box I was in my room like a typical college kid, cramming for a history midterm in the wee hours of the morning. He told me the radio station he listened to talked about this new device that was better at contacting spirits than the Ouija board. Jarrett had tried the Ouija board many times before, but it never produced any results so this was big news for him. Before he could open his mouth to say anything more about what he learned, I immediately turned around and told him that I needed to study for the exam tomorrow and didn’t have the time to listen to his ridiculous stories on the otherworld. He shrugged my annoyed tone off and left my room, probably pondering about the newfound information he acquired.
The next day I was completely exhausted from studying all night, taking my midterm, and working all day, so when I stepped into the apartment seeing him on the living room floor handling a couple of double sided mirrors I asked in a grouchy manner, “What are you doing?” I noticed there were a few other mirrors splayed out around the floor next to him.
“I’m building a Devil’s Toy Box,” he simply replied without looking up from his work. He was carefully gluing the edges of two of the mirrors together and started to work on the third.
“What is the Devil’s Toy Box?” I questioned while I crashed onto the free couch we found while looking on Craigslist a few months ago. I might not have believed in the supernatural and all that comes with it, but I’ve always had the curiosity to learn new things and that included what I didn’t understand.
Jarrett explained the Devil’s Toy Box was a cube created with mirrors facing each other on all sides. He continued to talk about how the toy box worked and that it was possible the mirror’s reflection off of each other’s surfaces created enough energy to make portal to another dimension—I drifted off to sleep shortly after. I was barely awake when I opened my eyes to see him placing the six by six inch toy box on the table with the microphone on top to record any noises from it. My eyes closed again and I didn’t wake up until the next morning.
Two weeks had passed and nothing out of the ordinary happened with the cube made of mirrors. However, Jarrett was very patient, the months of playing on the Ouija board with no success was proof of his tenacity on the paranormal.
I was alone in the apartment when it finally happened.
I was sitting on the couch reading my favorite book when I heard a faint noise. At first I ignored the sound, thinking it was something coming from outside or downstairs, but I heard a slow, barely audible scratching coming from Jarrett’s little project. My eyes immediately looked up from the words on the page and stared at the object in front of me as the sound progressively inched down inside one of the panels. I didn’t think scratching noises coming from mirrors was possible, but I was there and I heard the entire thing. I stared at that mirror seeing the reflection of the open book I held on my lap until the sound stopped.
I didn’t know how to react, since I’ve never had an incident like this happen to me before. Jarrett could have been trying to play a prank on me for all I knew, except he was out with his friends for the day. I set the book aside on the couch and kneeled down to look at the cube closer, gazing at my own blue eyes through the reflection. The entire room was silent, except the thoughts running through my mind trying to explain what happened.
Suddenly, the front door opens with a loud bang against the wall and I jumped just as Jarrett enters the room to see it all. Jarrett’s mouth curves into a smile as he closes the door behind him, “What’s gotten you so jumpy?” Seeing me sitting down near the cube partially scared from him slamming the door a minute ago answered his question immediately and his excitement escalated, “There was activity!”
Disgruntled and in denial, I replied, “I heard scratching, but it’s impossible the noise would be coming from your toy.” I stood up, crossing my arms together, and walked away from my seat. At the same time Jarrett took my place on the floor to inspect the toy box.
“Damn, the recorder wasn’t on,” I heard him whisper. He placed the small mic piece on top of the box for the best reception and turned on the recorder, which can last for hours while we are asleep. Satisfied with the set up, he commented while standing up and looking at me with his crooked grin, “That’ll do it. Hopefully we’ll find some activity going with the recorder on during the night.”
After morning came, I woke up and went to the living room to see Jarrett working on the volume to the audio. “Any signs of the paranormal?” I voiced in an exaggerated tone while I made my way into the kitchen to get breakfast.
“I just started listening to the audio,” he answered.
I came back with a bowl full of fruit loops, plopped myself down onto the couch, and watched Jarrett work on increasing the volume to the audio while it was playing through the first hour.
“You’re not going to find anything.” I commented.
However, as the words left my mouth, the same slow, incessant scratching I heard from yesterday began to play from the speakers. We were both silent as we heard the intermittent creaks that sounded like nails going down a chalkboard. The length of the noise lasted anywhere between a second and a minute, pausing at any given time until the scratching stopped after awhile.
Jarrett gazed at his toy box in amazement that he was able to record evidence of the paranormal right there in our living room. “I finally got it,” He said repeatedly a few more times in succession of each other and loudly once more, “I Got It!”
I exhaled when I heard my roommate speak. It was like the eerie silence in the room afterwards had intensified and made me hold my breath. At that moment I started to believe there was a possibility of spirits living in our world or coming to visit us from another dimension.
A couple of months passed after Jarrett had his first proof of the mysterious scratching noises recorded. During those two months he continued to make recordings of those sounds. Some of the sounds were so quiet he had to increase the volume on the audio all the way up to hear anything, while others were loud enough that the volume had to be lowered again. Scratches weren’t the only sounds these spirits or spirit would make; we didn’t know if there were only one or several different entities contacting us. Sometimes we would hear tapping noises consistently from the device, other days we would hear nothing at all from the recorder.
After the first month, some of those noises became shouts, snarls, and screams with the occasional knocking inside the box. Initially, Jarrett and I would only be able to hear the cries in the recording the mic picked up, but that changed one night when I was in the kitchen making the famous blue boxed Mac ‘N' Cheese for dinner. I was pouring the macaroni into the boiling pot when I heard a low snarl next to my right ear. Immediately my senses were heightened with fear, I held my breath and stood stiff as the last few pieces of macaroni fell from the box, creating small ripples in the water as they broke the surface. I heard the growl again, only it was weaker than the first one, and it soon faded away after a few seconds. I stood there foolishly for a minute or two and finally brought myself back to reality at the sound of the cooking macaroni.
“Oh no!” I shouted and dropped the empty box onto the counter, grabbing my wooden spoon to stir around the macaroni. Some of the noodles were becoming stuck on the bottom and I had to scrape the wooden spoon there a few times to break them free.
Jarrett came into the kitchen at that moment to grab a soda from the fridge and noticed I was acting a little edgy, “What’s gotten you?”
Still a little undone from the incident, I continued to stir the macaroni, I asked incredulously, “You didn’t hear anything?”
“No, I didn’t.” His reply was quick, but immediately following his answer, he figured out my slight apprehension had something to do with the Devil’s Toy Box. “What happened?”
I told him about the low growling the spirit—or whatever it was—did, and as with any new paranormal discovery his eyes lit up like a child, excited there was contact made from outside of the box. He took a sip from his coke bottle while going straight back to his room to record it in the journal he kept.
Jarrett kept track of everything in that journal like a religion. He would take note of every little detail the recording caught that was of significance to him. He wanted to make sure that if there were any differences in the audio, he would know about it.
Once summer had finally come, more occurrences happened in the apartment than what I could count. The lights would flicker on and off for a few seconds each night, sometimes I came into my room to discover my keys had fallen onto the floor from the desk with no explanation, and often at night I felt like there was a presence. You know that sudden rush of adrenaline you have when you walk into a room like someone else is watching you? I had never felt that way until after Jarrett set up the toy box in the living room. For the first time since I was a child I had felt afraid and I didn’t feel safe in that apartment anymore. But that fear wasn’t enough for me to move out of the place.
I think Jarrett was starting to be scared, too, although he never admitted it to me. Most of the strange things that happened in the apartment happened to me, but the worst was yet to come for him. It was like the spirit was slowly revealing their true colors the more the days progressed, and they didn’t want Jarrett, the instigator of the box, to become a role in their play just yet. As if making him too frightened would make him stop his research into the Devil’s Toy Box.
Our fears would only worsen in the coming weeks ahead.
On one of my days off I was watching the television when I thought I saw something flicker across the room from the corner of my eye. I turned my head to the left where the door to my room was wide open and didn’t see anything unusual happen. Thinking the mysterious movement was only my eyes tricking me, I went back to watching the news. However, I abruptly saw a shadow minutes later shaking in front of me and quickly dispersing into the mirror’s reflection. The darkness of the shadow swooped around the perimeter of the cube a few times before completely disappearing afterwards.
Just like my first encounter with the cube from the beginning, I stared at the reflection. I remember Jarrett telling me stories about shadow people before and didn’t believe in them, but the events leading up to this moment made me believe in those dark figures now. I felt a small chill in the living room as goosebumps traveled up on my arms when I was looking at the object. I saw the image of the news anchor’s reflection and their voices fade away as my attention was solely focused on this mere object before me.
Abruptly, I felt a quick jolt from the couch and that was enough to let my hair stand on end. I was stricken in a panic as the jolts became frequent, growing in strength, and I let out a shriek, which made Jarrett run into the living room to see what was happening.
“Oh my god!” He shouted when he saw the couch moving up from side to side and tried to steady the couch for me to get off with no avail. I was completely stuck. Some force that I didn’t even know existed weighed me down. “Get out of there, Cassie!”
“I can’t! Something is keeping me from moving,” I shouted back at Jarrett—all he could do now was to stand and watch in sudden panic. I frantically tried to move off of my seat while something held me down. The movement of the couch finally stopped with one last thump, but soon thereafter I felt the couch vibrate gradually from underneath me.
Tears started streaming down from my eyes, I didn’t want anything like this to happen to me like in the stories I read about. I felt an unknown pressure start to build and press down on couch’s center and I heard the wood begin to splinter and crack. Even though I couldn’t move from my seat, I was able to press down on the couch with my hands and tried force myself up. The unknown force pushing me down released their grip on me, and I managed to break free before the couch split into two separate pieces.
Silence over took the room, except the few gulps of air I took in as I continued to weep. My body was shaking, at that moment I never felt so afraid in my life. Jarrett came over to try to comfort me and said that everything was going to be okay; but it was already too late. I didn’t want to live in that apartment anymore, so I left the place to stay at a friend’s for a couple of weeks.
Jarrett stayed in the apartment even after he had witnessed the incident with his own eyes. After two weeks, I came back and saw the old couch wasn’t there any more. Jarrett said nothing like that had happened again, except now he could hear a voice coming from the cube. He said the voice told him there was a demon that was playing tricks on us that day, but the voice had rid the evil demon away and we could live in peace. If this happened a few months ago, I would have thought Jarrett had gone crazy. However, after all of the things that had happened to me during those months made me a believer. I told him that he shouldn’t trust the voice and he agreed with me. But he wanted to converse with the voice to gather information about worlds other than our own.
“You have to get rid of that thing!” I shouted. “It’s not safe!”
“You don’t understand! This is something big!” He retorted back. “We could get all kinds of information from this!”
Our argument went back and forth for a while until I was fed up; convincing him to change his mind now was useless.
Knowing his stubborn ways, I decided to take drastic measures into my own hands to take care of the destruction of the device myself. I walked straight to the cube with a purpose, but all of a sudden I felt that same fear of someone watching over my shoulder. Except this time that fear was directed to the Devil’s Toy Box in front of me. Immediately the room grew colder than what I have ever felt there before. I thought I saw a glimpse of some movement in the mirrors, but whatever it was it vanished as quickly as it came. Faint snickering coming from the device grew stronger until the sound filled the room with their presence.
Jarrett cried out from behind me and I heard him drop down to the floor in agony, screaming, “STOP!”
I turned around to see Jarrett sitting in the fetal position. My hands shook from the massive adrenaline rush of the fight or flight response as I went to see what was wrong. I saw Jarrett’s hands hold onto his head, which was buried between his knees, and he was slowly rocking himself back and forth. There was only one thing left for me to do and it was to destroy the very thing that was making these events occur. Before I stood up to take action, I saw the cube shaking violently on the table while hearing constant snarls and screeches mixed in with incomprehensible banter. The mirror clinked and clanked against the table and exploded all around the room. I hurriedly covered my eyes with an arm as shards of mirror struck past Jarrett and me.
After the mirror broke, the noises ceased and Jarrett stopped crying in pain. We found out later he had red burnt marks all over his arms and legs from the demon that was hurting him.
I didn’t stay in the apartment after that day, except to move everything out to stay with a friend who had a room available for rent. Jarrett moved out a couple of months later after he found a cheap apartment in a neighboring city. We didn’t keep much contact with each other, so I heard from mutual friends that Jarrett was never the same. He kept to himself more and was quick to anger like he was a whole different person. I saw him at the local music store one day. However, when I acknowledged his presence, he turned his back to me and walked in the opposite direction.
A year later I heard Jarrett died in his car from crashing into a tree. The officials blamed the crash from him sleeping on the wheel. Although I cannot help but believe that something else may have gradually forced him to crash that day.
The apartment we stayed in was hard to sell. People would complain that the temperature would lower for no reason, or they thought they saw something move in the corner of their eyes. They didn’t feel safe being there at any given length of time, so most of them moved out after a month or two.
For the final time I implore you to never experiment with the Devil’s Toy Box. I want this story to be a lesson to all who may be interested in testing this little box of horrors. Experimenting with a box isn’t worth the time and the stress that comes along with it. Most importantly, the project isn’t worth the life that it took from Jarrett.
Let me tell you, I had never dappled into the paranormal, I consider myself an atheist and a non-believer of anything that cannot be explained without reasoning first. However, my roommate, Jarrett, was completely the opposite; he was a fanatic of the supernatural. His room was littered with books about aliens, ghosts, and anything else that was out of the ordinary. Jarrett even had the entire collection of the X-Files on DVD—including all of the movies. He was one of those people that believed the government covered up the Roswell incident way back in 1947, and believed all of the ghost stories and strange incidents he would hear on the radio or saw on the TV. One day he made the decision that he wanted to be a part of one of those ghost stories he heard and watched from the media. He became a part of one of those stories told all right, and I am a witness to those strange occurrences that happened in our apartment. What happened in our apartment that year changed my perception on the unexplained forever, and I urge you to never experiment in the Devil’s Toy Box like Jarrett did. No one knew what the toy box was fully capable of doing, but it changed the course of my life forever, and ultimately, it changed Jarrett’s, too.
The first time Jarrett told me about the Devil’s Toy Box I was in my room like a typical college kid, cramming for a history midterm in the wee hours of the morning. He told me the radio station he listened to talked about this new device that was better at contacting spirits than the Ouija board. Jarrett had tried the Ouija board many times before, but it never produced any results so this was big news for him. Before he could open his mouth to say anything more about what he learned, I immediately turned around and told him that I needed to study for the exam tomorrow and didn’t have the time to listen to his ridiculous stories on the otherworld. He shrugged my annoyed tone off and left my room, probably pondering about the newfound information he acquired.
The next day I was completely exhausted from studying all night, taking my midterm, and working all day, so when I stepped into the apartment seeing him on the living room floor handling a couple of double sided mirrors I asked in a grouchy manner, “What are you doing?” I noticed there were a few other mirrors splayed out around the floor next to him.
“I’m building a Devil’s Toy Box,” he simply replied without looking up from his work. He was carefully gluing the edges of two of the mirrors together and started to work on the third.
“What is the Devil’s Toy Box?” I questioned while I crashed onto the free couch we found while looking on Craigslist a few months ago. I might not have believed in the supernatural and all that comes with it, but I’ve always had the curiosity to learn new things and that included what I didn’t understand.
Jarrett explained the Devil’s Toy Box was a cube created with mirrors facing each other on all sides. He continued to talk about how the toy box worked and that it was possible the mirror’s reflection off of each other’s surfaces created enough energy to make portal to another dimension—I drifted off to sleep shortly after. I was barely awake when I opened my eyes to see him placing the six by six inch toy box on the table with the microphone on top to record any noises from it. My eyes closed again and I didn’t wake up until the next morning.
Two weeks had passed and nothing out of the ordinary happened with the cube made of mirrors. However, Jarrett was very patient, the months of playing on the Ouija board with no success was proof of his tenacity on the paranormal.
I was alone in the apartment when it finally happened.
I was sitting on the couch reading my favorite book when I heard a faint noise. At first I ignored the sound, thinking it was something coming from outside or downstairs, but I heard a slow, barely audible scratching coming from Jarrett’s little project. My eyes immediately looked up from the words on the page and stared at the object in front of me as the sound progressively inched down inside one of the panels. I didn’t think scratching noises coming from mirrors was possible, but I was there and I heard the entire thing. I stared at that mirror seeing the reflection of the open book I held on my lap until the sound stopped.
I didn’t know how to react, since I’ve never had an incident like this happen to me before. Jarrett could have been trying to play a prank on me for all I knew, except he was out with his friends for the day. I set the book aside on the couch and kneeled down to look at the cube closer, gazing at my own blue eyes through the reflection. The entire room was silent, except the thoughts running through my mind trying to explain what happened.
Suddenly, the front door opens with a loud bang against the wall and I jumped just as Jarrett enters the room to see it all. Jarrett’s mouth curves into a smile as he closes the door behind him, “What’s gotten you so jumpy?” Seeing me sitting down near the cube partially scared from him slamming the door a minute ago answered his question immediately and his excitement escalated, “There was activity!”
Disgruntled and in denial, I replied, “I heard scratching, but it’s impossible the noise would be coming from your toy.” I stood up, crossing my arms together, and walked away from my seat. At the same time Jarrett took my place on the floor to inspect the toy box.
“Damn, the recorder wasn’t on,” I heard him whisper. He placed the small mic piece on top of the box for the best reception and turned on the recorder, which can last for hours while we are asleep. Satisfied with the set up, he commented while standing up and looking at me with his crooked grin, “That’ll do it. Hopefully we’ll find some activity going with the recorder on during the night.”
After morning came, I woke up and went to the living room to see Jarrett working on the volume to the audio. “Any signs of the paranormal?” I voiced in an exaggerated tone while I made my way into the kitchen to get breakfast.
“I just started listening to the audio,” he answered.
I came back with a bowl full of fruit loops, plopped myself down onto the couch, and watched Jarrett work on increasing the volume to the audio while it was playing through the first hour.
“You’re not going to find anything.” I commented.
However, as the words left my mouth, the same slow, incessant scratching I heard from yesterday began to play from the speakers. We were both silent as we heard the intermittent creaks that sounded like nails going down a chalkboard. The length of the noise lasted anywhere between a second and a minute, pausing at any given time until the scratching stopped after awhile.
Jarrett gazed at his toy box in amazement that he was able to record evidence of the paranormal right there in our living room. “I finally got it,” He said repeatedly a few more times in succession of each other and loudly once more, “I Got It!”
I exhaled when I heard my roommate speak. It was like the eerie silence in the room afterwards had intensified and made me hold my breath. At that moment I started to believe there was a possibility of spirits living in our world or coming to visit us from another dimension.
A couple of months passed after Jarrett had his first proof of the mysterious scratching noises recorded. During those two months he continued to make recordings of those sounds. Some of the sounds were so quiet he had to increase the volume on the audio all the way up to hear anything, while others were loud enough that the volume had to be lowered again. Scratches weren’t the only sounds these spirits or spirit would make; we didn’t know if there were only one or several different entities contacting us. Sometimes we would hear tapping noises consistently from the device, other days we would hear nothing at all from the recorder.
After the first month, some of those noises became shouts, snarls, and screams with the occasional knocking inside the box. Initially, Jarrett and I would only be able to hear the cries in the recording the mic picked up, but that changed one night when I was in the kitchen making the famous blue boxed Mac ‘N' Cheese for dinner. I was pouring the macaroni into the boiling pot when I heard a low snarl next to my right ear. Immediately my senses were heightened with fear, I held my breath and stood stiff as the last few pieces of macaroni fell from the box, creating small ripples in the water as they broke the surface. I heard the growl again, only it was weaker than the first one, and it soon faded away after a few seconds. I stood there foolishly for a minute or two and finally brought myself back to reality at the sound of the cooking macaroni.
“Oh no!” I shouted and dropped the empty box onto the counter, grabbing my wooden spoon to stir around the macaroni. Some of the noodles were becoming stuck on the bottom and I had to scrape the wooden spoon there a few times to break them free.
Jarrett came into the kitchen at that moment to grab a soda from the fridge and noticed I was acting a little edgy, “What’s gotten you?”
Still a little undone from the incident, I continued to stir the macaroni, I asked incredulously, “You didn’t hear anything?”
“No, I didn’t.” His reply was quick, but immediately following his answer, he figured out my slight apprehension had something to do with the Devil’s Toy Box. “What happened?”
I told him about the low growling the spirit—or whatever it was—did, and as with any new paranormal discovery his eyes lit up like a child, excited there was contact made from outside of the box. He took a sip from his coke bottle while going straight back to his room to record it in the journal he kept.
Jarrett kept track of everything in that journal like a religion. He would take note of every little detail the recording caught that was of significance to him. He wanted to make sure that if there were any differences in the audio, he would know about it.
Once summer had finally come, more occurrences happened in the apartment than what I could count. The lights would flicker on and off for a few seconds each night, sometimes I came into my room to discover my keys had fallen onto the floor from the desk with no explanation, and often at night I felt like there was a presence. You know that sudden rush of adrenaline you have when you walk into a room like someone else is watching you? I had never felt that way until after Jarrett set up the toy box in the living room. For the first time since I was a child I had felt afraid and I didn’t feel safe in that apartment anymore. But that fear wasn’t enough for me to move out of the place.
I think Jarrett was starting to be scared, too, although he never admitted it to me. Most of the strange things that happened in the apartment happened to me, but the worst was yet to come for him. It was like the spirit was slowly revealing their true colors the more the days progressed, and they didn’t want Jarrett, the instigator of the box, to become a role in their play just yet. As if making him too frightened would make him stop his research into the Devil’s Toy Box.
Our fears would only worsen in the coming weeks ahead.
On one of my days off I was watching the television when I thought I saw something flicker across the room from the corner of my eye. I turned my head to the left where the door to my room was wide open and didn’t see anything unusual happen. Thinking the mysterious movement was only my eyes tricking me, I went back to watching the news. However, I abruptly saw a shadow minutes later shaking in front of me and quickly dispersing into the mirror’s reflection. The darkness of the shadow swooped around the perimeter of the cube a few times before completely disappearing afterwards.
Just like my first encounter with the cube from the beginning, I stared at the reflection. I remember Jarrett telling me stories about shadow people before and didn’t believe in them, but the events leading up to this moment made me believe in those dark figures now. I felt a small chill in the living room as goosebumps traveled up on my arms when I was looking at the object. I saw the image of the news anchor’s reflection and their voices fade away as my attention was solely focused on this mere object before me.
Abruptly, I felt a quick jolt from the couch and that was enough to let my hair stand on end. I was stricken in a panic as the jolts became frequent, growing in strength, and I let out a shriek, which made Jarrett run into the living room to see what was happening.
“Oh my god!” He shouted when he saw the couch moving up from side to side and tried to steady the couch for me to get off with no avail. I was completely stuck. Some force that I didn’t even know existed weighed me down. “Get out of there, Cassie!”
“I can’t! Something is keeping me from moving,” I shouted back at Jarrett—all he could do now was to stand and watch in sudden panic. I frantically tried to move off of my seat while something held me down. The movement of the couch finally stopped with one last thump, but soon thereafter I felt the couch vibrate gradually from underneath me.
Tears started streaming down from my eyes, I didn’t want anything like this to happen to me like in the stories I read about. I felt an unknown pressure start to build and press down on couch’s center and I heard the wood begin to splinter and crack. Even though I couldn’t move from my seat, I was able to press down on the couch with my hands and tried force myself up. The unknown force pushing me down released their grip on me, and I managed to break free before the couch split into two separate pieces.
Silence over took the room, except the few gulps of air I took in as I continued to weep. My body was shaking, at that moment I never felt so afraid in my life. Jarrett came over to try to comfort me and said that everything was going to be okay; but it was already too late. I didn’t want to live in that apartment anymore, so I left the place to stay at a friend’s for a couple of weeks.
Jarrett stayed in the apartment even after he had witnessed the incident with his own eyes. After two weeks, I came back and saw the old couch wasn’t there any more. Jarrett said nothing like that had happened again, except now he could hear a voice coming from the cube. He said the voice told him there was a demon that was playing tricks on us that day, but the voice had rid the evil demon away and we could live in peace. If this happened a few months ago, I would have thought Jarrett had gone crazy. However, after all of the things that had happened to me during those months made me a believer. I told him that he shouldn’t trust the voice and he agreed with me. But he wanted to converse with the voice to gather information about worlds other than our own.
“You have to get rid of that thing!” I shouted. “It’s not safe!”
“You don’t understand! This is something big!” He retorted back. “We could get all kinds of information from this!”
Our argument went back and forth for a while until I was fed up; convincing him to change his mind now was useless.
Knowing his stubborn ways, I decided to take drastic measures into my own hands to take care of the destruction of the device myself. I walked straight to the cube with a purpose, but all of a sudden I felt that same fear of someone watching over my shoulder. Except this time that fear was directed to the Devil’s Toy Box in front of me. Immediately the room grew colder than what I have ever felt there before. I thought I saw a glimpse of some movement in the mirrors, but whatever it was it vanished as quickly as it came. Faint snickering coming from the device grew stronger until the sound filled the room with their presence.
Jarrett cried out from behind me and I heard him drop down to the floor in agony, screaming, “STOP!”
I turned around to see Jarrett sitting in the fetal position. My hands shook from the massive adrenaline rush of the fight or flight response as I went to see what was wrong. I saw Jarrett’s hands hold onto his head, which was buried between his knees, and he was slowly rocking himself back and forth. There was only one thing left for me to do and it was to destroy the very thing that was making these events occur. Before I stood up to take action, I saw the cube shaking violently on the table while hearing constant snarls and screeches mixed in with incomprehensible banter. The mirror clinked and clanked against the table and exploded all around the room. I hurriedly covered my eyes with an arm as shards of mirror struck past Jarrett and me.
After the mirror broke, the noises ceased and Jarrett stopped crying in pain. We found out later he had red burnt marks all over his arms and legs from the demon that was hurting him.
I didn’t stay in the apartment after that day, except to move everything out to stay with a friend who had a room available for rent. Jarrett moved out a couple of months later after he found a cheap apartment in a neighboring city. We didn’t keep much contact with each other, so I heard from mutual friends that Jarrett was never the same. He kept to himself more and was quick to anger like he was a whole different person. I saw him at the local music store one day. However, when I acknowledged his presence, he turned his back to me and walked in the opposite direction.
A year later I heard Jarrett died in his car from crashing into a tree. The officials blamed the crash from him sleeping on the wheel. Although I cannot help but believe that something else may have gradually forced him to crash that day.
The apartment we stayed in was hard to sell. People would complain that the temperature would lower for no reason, or they thought they saw something move in the corner of their eyes. They didn’t feel safe being there at any given length of time, so most of them moved out after a month or two.
For the final time I implore you to never experiment with the Devil’s Toy Box. I want this story to be a lesson to all who may be interested in testing this little box of horrors. Experimenting with a box isn’t worth the time and the stress that comes along with it. Most importantly, the project isn’t worth the life that it took from Jarrett.
