by William D. Carl
I perused the package as the delivery truck made its departure from my driveway. There was no return address on the plain, brown paper wrapping that had been so carefully measured and secured with cellophane tape. I had not been expecting anything, but it was my name scrawled in an angry red crayon on the paper. I called out to my wife, Elaine, asked her if she had ordered something else from on-line, but she told me that she hadn’t ordered anything in weeks. Wiping her hands on a dishtowel, she sat next to me on the sofa, our dog, Johnson, on her other side, watching with a wagging curiosity.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” she asked. “It’s probably just something your Mother sent you.”
I could feel my fingertips tingling where they touched the surface of the package, almost as though the brown paper had been soaked in a mild acid. I knew that this was unusual, and it was definitely not my Mother’s neat handwriting. Still, I edged a fingernail beneath the paper of one side of the box, ripping it free. It opened easily. It wanted to be opened.
Wrapped within white tissue paper, I discovered A gold Cross pen, very much like the one that I used to write my daily column for the local newspaper. I furrowed my brow.
“Isn’t that your pen?” Elaine asked, touching my shoulder.
“It looks like mine. In fact, it looks exactly like my pen.”
I carried it with me in a small pocket protector at all times. The pen had been a college graduation present from my Father, who had died two weeks after I received my diploma. In his memory, I still used it, even though the refills were becoming more and more difficult to find.
Pulling my pen from my pocket, I compared it with the one that had just been delivered to me. They were duplicates in every possible way, down to the scratch at the top of each handle, a scratch I had accidentally inflicted when dropping the pen from the top of a fire escape. I opened each pen, and I noticed that the ink cartridges were both a little less than a quarter full. I held them up to the light, noticed that the ink levels were exactly the same. I had used the pen that morning. How could anyone know, to the millimeter, how much ink I had used?
It was odd, but with no note or return address, we chalked it up to one of those ‘weird things that sometimes happen with no explanation,’ like when you put a pair of socks in the drying machine and only one remains when you gather the laundry. It was bizarre, but not earth-shatteringly so.
Until that evening, when I was taking Elaine and our son, Joey, to the movies. As I stepped out of the car, I leaned in such a way that my beloved Cross pen from my Father, slipped from the pocket protector and fell into a sewer grate. I could hear the rushing of water from it, and I knew that the pen was long gone.
Still, someone had sent me a replacement earlier that day, a substitute for something I would lose eight hours later.
I almost expected the pen to have disappeared when I returned from the film. I had barely noticed the flickering images on the screen, concentrating on the gift that had been delivered to me. How could anyone know that I would lose the pen that day? How could anyone replace it with such a thoroughly detailed copy? Then again, was it a copy? Could some weird time shift have occurred? Could this actually be my pen? All the science fiction I had devoured in my teen years came back to me, all of the time travel theory I had gleaned through pulpy ACE paperbacks. According to all the books, the same object could not coexist in the same time. So, it had to be some sort of duplicate of my pen, a substitute for the lost one.... which hadn’t even been lost yet.
After a few weeks, I had still found no answer, but life trudged along, and mysterious pens were forgotten until the next time the delivery truck stopped at my house with another small package, carefully wrapped and taped with plain brown paper. Once again, my name was childishly scribbled in red crayon, my address below it. The same tingling overtook my fingertips as I held it. Johnson woofed at the package once, before leaving the room, disinterested.
This parcel held my wedding ring. Comparing it to the one on my finger, I saw the same inscription, the same wear and tear of the past twelve years. The nicks in the gold matched perfectly. I showed it to Elaine. Then, we both waited. I replaced my wedding band to my finger, trying to make it fit as tightly as possible.
That night, as I dried the dishes and Elaine was forcing leftover food into the garbage disposal, I leaned over the sink for a towel. My wedding ring slipped from my finger, and I felt something tug at it, as though it weren’t merely falling off my finger but being taken from me. Cursing, I reached for it, stopping myself when my grasping hand almost went into the grinding gears of the disposal unit. Elaine cried out, flipped the switch of the machine to the off position. When I pulled the ring from the sink drain, I retrieved an irreparable, twisted lump of metal. There was no way that this could be fixed.
Elaine and I glanced at each other, then our eyes found the duplicate wedding ring that gleamed from the end table in the next room. I stepped to it, placed it firmly on my finger, and finished drying the dishes.
It was spooky, strange, but it wasn’t disturbing. It was almost a good feeling, as though some cosmic force was watching out for me, replacing everything that I lost with duplicates so that I wouldn’t grieve.
The packages kept coming, usually a week or two in between each one. They all contained a single item which was wrapped in white tissue paper. I received such treasures as a paperweight Joey had bought me for Father’s Day one year, a copy of my senior yearbook, a birthday card given to me on the first year Elaine and I were married. I got my favorite mug the same day that I dropped that mug and shattered it on the floor of the kitchen. I signed for a package that contained a videocassette of my favorite film, which had been out of print for more than ten years, and that evening, my copy was eaten by the VCR.
One day, a much larger package arrived with airholes punched in the top. Inside of it was an exact copy of Johnson, our beloved Cocker Spaniel. My heart sank in my chest as I watched the duplicate step out of the box, walk to the far side of the room, and lay down, closing its eyes. Johnson, himself, paid no attention to the new dog, ignoring its presence with the disdain that only a Cocker Spaniel could affect.
That evening, Joey let Johnson outside to spray the bushes. I sensed the screeching brakes before I heard them. When I looked at the corner, I saw the new Johnson stand and shake the sleep from his limbs. He looked at me with those same begging eyes, but I saw an emptiness behind them where Johnson’s personality used to shine and sparkle. I reached out to pet him, and he growled at me, a deep sound that came from way down in his chest. Withdrawing my hand, I crept outside. A man was on the doorstep, tears in his eyes, and Johnson’s dead, bleeding body in his arms.
Joey was heartbroken, and we buried Johnson in the back yard beneath the old elm tree. The new dog watched us, that same blank look in its eyes. Joey returned to the house, ignoring the new Johnson. That night, he told me that he thought there was something wrong with the new dog. He wept in my arms, telling me that it wasn’t really Johnson, and I couldn’t comfort him. All I could do was stroke his hair, the soft color of straw, until he closed his blue eyes. I promised that I would get rid of the new dog somehow, even though I had no idea of what I was going to do.
That night, I locked the dog outside on the front porch. I didn’t want that blank-faced thing in the house while we slept.
I spent the entire night thinking about the packages. So far, I had never dreaded them. They had become almost welcomed in the house, providing replacement items for things that were lost.
But whatever force was sending these replacements, obviously couldn’t replace a living thing that was taken from you. Certainly, the new dog looked exactly like Johnson, down to the last marking and the gray hair between his paws. Still, there was something missing. Whatever had made Johnson the dog that he had been, was lost forever, so I was sent a container without anything inside of it. I was delivered a shell.
In the morning, I found the Johnson-replacement still sitting in the same position I had left him on the previous night. He looked at me, and I met the gaze of something without a soul. In that moment, I knew what I had to do.
I took the shotgun that I sometimes used for hunting from the front closet and was on my way upstairs to where I kept the ammunition, when there was a knock on the front door. The hairs on the back of my neck and arms raised, prickled. As I moved to the door, I could hear the deep humming of the delivery truck.
Another package. So soon?
The terror that filled my gut threatened to overflow several times as I opened the door and signed for the new package. It took all my strength not to send the delivery man back to his truck, refusing the package. As I closed the door, I saw the dog in the same position, patiently waiting for something.
The package was small this time, less than seven inches long and two inches wide. I would be losing something small today, and it was a relief. It took me nearly fifteen minutes to summon enough bravado to open the parcel, to carefully peel back the tissue paper.
“Oh Christ,” I muttered, flinging the package back on the table, “Oh my Good Christ!”
The tissue paper wasn’t white this time, but a deep crimson, nearly brown. Within its folds, I saw a finger. It looked as though it had been torn from the hand, just at the knuckle, the flesh torn and still wet and bloody, the bone emerging from the gristle as white as pearl. Placing my hand beside the box, I saw the same fish-hook scar just below the cuticle of my right forefinger. Actually, it didn’t look torn off, it looked bitten off.
Knowing what this meant, it only strengthened my resolve to get rid of the thing that was on the doorstep of my house. I marched upstairs, loaded the shotgun, and hurried back to the front porch.
I was going to lose a finger today.
Dragging the dog around to the back of the house, I felt no resistance in the animal. It seemed to know its path in life was almost done.
What could tear a finger off like that? A wild animal?
A dog?
Christ, it was this dog. It had to be.
Knowing I could prevent the beast from gnawing off my forefinger, I placed the rifle barrel against its furry head. Gazing at me with those empty eyes, it sighed, resigned to its fate.
I was not going to stand by and lose a finger to this monster, this dead thing. I would take matters into my own hands. I wanted to stop this cycle of loss and delivery, here and now, with this shotgun.
I pulled the trigger, closing my eyes. Joey’s tow-headed face appealed to me behind my eyelids. There was a sharp retort.
And the gun backfired, blasting my right forefinger from my hand in a spray of blood and tendon. I screamed, watched in horror as the Johnson replicant took the finger in its mouth and began chewing. I could hear the snap of the bone.
“Son of a bitch!” I screamed, using my middle finger to pull the trigger and fire the other round into the dog’s head. It burst open like a flower, opening in stop motion brilliance. Petals of its flesh fell around its collar.
I buried it in a shallow grave, far from Johnson’s place beneath the elm tree. I didn’t want it to taint the burial place of the dog we had all loved so much.
I was becoming dizzy from the loss of blood when I rushed into the house, grabbed the new, duplicate finger which I had just received, and called for Elaine to drive me to a hospital. They managed to sew the finger back on to my hand, although it took eight different surgeries and a total of eleven days in the hospital.
The whole time I remained cooped up in there, I thought about my losses and how they’d been replaced. Were some things meant to be lost and meant to stay lost? Could some things never be replaced? Should we even try to replace these things we lose, even things that are very precious to us?
Would I have lost my finger without the loss of Johnson? I wouldn’t have blown it off if I hadn’t received a replacement for Johnson, that was certain. The arrival of the finger by parcel post seemed to indicate that there was an inevitability to the loss of the finger. If that shotgun hadn’t misfired, would something else have happened to have the same effect? It made my head hurt.
When I returned home, Elaine tucked Joey in for the night, and I said ‘sweet dreams’ to the three year old I loved more than anything else in this world. We spent most of the night talking, vocalizing our fears and our dread.
What would be delivered next?
We talked about moving, discussed the fact that whatever sent these packages would probably discover where we went and follow us. We discussed hiding, going to the police, telling the neighbors. Perhaps the same thing was happening all over the neighborhood and we just didn’t realize it.
I didn’t sleep that night, either, and in the morning, I could see colored spots out of the corners of my eyes. Sleep deprivation did strange things to your mind. I couldn’t stop thinking, even as I brewed my coffee in the kitchen and heard the scratching at the back door.
Peering outside, I saw something that made me run to the sink to vomit. The replacement Johnson, its head still burst open like some over-ripe fruit, was scratching the back door to be allowed inside. Dirt covered its fur, and the blood that spattered its brown and white body was a deep rust color. As I looked out again, I saw it raise its paw and gently scratch the door. A gurgling whine trickled from its ruined throat.
Behind me, I heard the delivery truck parking outside my front door. My heart hammering in my mouth, I turned, opened it, greeted the grinning delivery man. He had to use a hand-truck this time, the package was so large, at least four feet tall, the size and shape of a...
Jesus, no!
...small coffin. A child-sized coffin.
Please, God, no!
“Big one this time, Mr. Pallas,” the delivery man said, his grin growing. “Don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what’s in all these boxes you’ve been getting lately?”
I shook my head, allowing him into the house so he could set the package in the living room. Loosening the hand-truck, he left the room, a puzzled look on his face.
A scratching from the back door...gentle, persistent.
“Mr. Pallas, you all right?”
“It’s loss, kid. That’s what you’ve been bringing me.”
“Huh?”
“Just go,” I whispered, then, gaining some composure, I shouted at him, “Go, goddammit! Get out of here!”
He left quickly, not even asking for a signature. He probably thought I was insane, and he wasn’t far from the truth.
Elaine came down from upstairs, a worried look crossing her wrinkled forehead, “I’m worried about Joey. He’s got a pretty high fever....Oh my God.” She caught sight of the package.
Another scratch from the back door. I tried to ignore it as I moved to the box, began peeling the brown paper from the cardboard. I noticed that all of my fingers burned and tingled except for the new one that had been replaced.
“Ken, there’s something at the back door,” she said, heading for the kitchen.
I stopped, knowing what was in the box. I didn’t need to actually see it. I could feel him inside, waiting.
Joey’s coughing from upstairs seemed to change into a severe hacking, phlegm refusing to loosen its hold on his esophagus. I knew how sick he was.
What if I didn’t open the package? What if I left it there in the living room without exposing the replacement that I knew waited within its cardboard walls? Would it change anything?
Could I ever change anything?
My wife was now in the kitchen, at the back door.
As a husband, as a father, I had tried to change things so many times. Discipline and steadfastness only went so far, but there had been times when I had changed the outcome of a bad situation.
Behind me, I heard the latch open, the sound of toenails on the kitchen tiles.
Elaine screamed, something gurgled, deep and low.
Collapsing on the front room floor, I heard the cautious knock on the front door, the voice of the delivery man saying, “Mr. Pallas, there’s actually two packages, and this one is bigger than the last.”
© 2003 William D. Carl