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You come home one afternoon to find a package waiting for you in the mailbox. It’s a small parcel with only the image of a smiling, friendly jack-o-lantern where a sender’s address should be. When you open the package, a porcelain pumpkin bearing the same smile as the sender’s image falls into your palm. The only other thing that you can find in the package is a small business card with the name Perniciousa inscribed in gold lettering. When you google the name, nothing comes up but you’re pretty sure you recall seeing a new store pop up with that name on the outskirts of the shopping district of Destiny City. It must be some sort of advertisement for the holiday season - neat! The store doesn't look quite open yet but hopefully it will be in time for the holiday!
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Every person who happens to have received one of the unaddressed pumpkin baubles begins to feel oddly strange. You find yourself growing more irritable and restless. You’re finding it difficult to sleep and when you do manage to sleep, your dreams are plagued with nightmares. The weird symptoms don’t fade when you power up - you’re just as irritable, if not even more, when you roam the streets as your alter ego. What's gotten into you all of a sudden?
It was an unobtrusive little package, one that, if he had looked at it close enough, might have been something that he'd ordered from Etsy or Amazon whenever he was drunk and not actually paying attention to which websites he was looking at. Steele didn't even drink that much, but lately the bottle had been easier to reach for than the phone, and who was he supposed to call anyway? It wasn't like he had a host of friends or family that would be there to go out with, so he was leaning instead towards forming a secure and long lasting relationship with his bottle of bourbon and its partner, scotch.
The scotch was harder to take than the bourbon. Steele found that it burned going down, but maybe it would sear some sense into him.
He had answered the knock to his door in a dress shirt and boxers patterned with stars, much to the amusement of the FedEx guy. Steele had plucked it from the man's fingers without so much as a thank you and shut the door in his face, padding back to his cramped living room in sock feet before collapsing down onto the couch with the box in his lap.
It did not look like it had come from either Etsy or Amazon. Steele turned it over, frowning slightly, then sat up just enough to pick up a pen sitting on his living room table. He sank back into the couch, lifted the pen, and dug it into the tape that ran around the box in a circle, ripping the tape unceremoniously and probably with a little more force than necessary, until it finally gave way enough for him to drop the pen and wrench open the cardboard flaps, prying them with ink stained fingers.
Inside was a...pumpkin.
Steele squinted at it. It was a gaudy, tacky thing, porcelain with a glossy sheen; the kind of thing he was used to seeing on grandmother's shelves or in the window of thrift stores. The kind of thing that people gave as gifts, and the people who got them smiled and nodded and then stuck it away in the attack for years because it was a dumb sort of trinket that really held no value whatsoever.
He slid a finger down one side of it, feeling the smooth edge. There was a card in the box; Steele dug around inside and pulled it out, flipping it over to see the word Perniciousa scrawled elegantly across it; a sharp contrast in professional and tacky.
Steele had never heard of Perniciousa before. He set the pumpkin down in his lap and grabbed for his phone, typing in the name on the card, but Google came up with nothing helpful whatsoever except to tell him that pernicious was a synonym for detrimental, which was wildly unhelpful. There was nothing to indicate where this stupid ceramic pumpkin had come from, no return address of any kind to at least give him a heads up.
Though now that he came to think of it....he did recall having seen something involving that name on a storefront downtown, only a block or two away from his office. Steele ran a hand through his blond hair, disarray some of its sleekness, though it was already kind of a mess from several days of not brushing or styling it. He let his head fall back onto the couch and stared up at the ceiling, gaze a little unfocused, the liquor making him feel sluggish and disinterested and unhappy.
What was the point of getting drunk if he was just going to continue to feel things? The point of getting drunk was so that he would most decidedly not feel things.
He set the pumpkin and the empty box and the card on the living room table and made his way into the kitchen for a snack, putting them all out of his mind.
The nightmares came for him that night, like hands reaching up through the ground to drag him under. Clawed fingers scrabbling at his ankles, vines wrapping around his throat, a dark, suffocating blackness laying atop him like a blanket. He woke up several times, gasping and shaking, scrabbling for the bedside lamp to turn on the light, but it didn't help the claustrophobic feeling go away. Steele tore his sweaty shirt from his body and sank back down into the blankets, turning onto his side, trying hard not to think about anything.
He left the light on and went back to sleep.
But the nightmares came back.
The next night was a repeat of the first, only worse. Blackened bodies staggering towards him with sunken eyes and hollowed out cheeks and ghastly, horrific breath that sent clouds of vitreous smoke billowing towards him. Blood dripping from his bed when he pulled back the covers, splashing down onto the floor so that it crawled up his legs and twisted scarlet around his skin, covering him like a suit of armor, though it stank of the coppery metallic tang of blood.
He kept all the lights on this time.
He was in a spectacularly foul mood for three days straight. His head hurt as much as his body did, and a complete lack of actual sleep meant that he was irritable and snappish to anyone who came too near him - namely his secretaries and his assistants, one of which seemed not to care, the other of which who stalked off threatening to quit after he barked at her for giving him the wrong paperwork for the third time in a row.
Steele did not see the point in arguing. She was a useless secretary, anyway. He could have cared less if she quit.
The bad mood persisted throughout the week, a foul and tasteless thing in his mouth, like ashes or smoke filling his lungs. Steele did not smoke, but he was tempted to start, if only because he wanted - needed - something to take his mind off of everything. Something to keep him from being dragged beneath the surface of the water again, all of his emotions raw and on edge, his nerves fraying so badly that he was falling apart at the seams.
He'd always known he was a wreck; this was just exposing that part of himself he kept secret.
