[ PART FOUR ] "The Condemned" - Short Story

Instructions

2:23 pm, The Tale With each passing day, the young man seemed to grow more and more paranoid and jumpy. He paced about his room during the daylight hours, muttering. When he was in a state of particular distress, he would fall face first upon his bed sob uncontrollably. He howled and cried and carried on until the newsman on the television began to scream at him in demonic fury and Mr. Eiusdem fell silent again on account of his fear. Every few hours, a meal was offered to the young man, but he never ate them. The young man had emptied the glass of water on the nightstand long ago, and yet the pair of white pills remained untouched. During one distinctly hysteric episode, the young man turned over all of the furniture and stamped his foot on the television, slamming his knuckles against the wood boards of the walls and tearing at the carpet with his nails, screaming about a hidden exit. He did not find one, and eventually his frenzied energy retired into deep exhaustion, and he fell asleep on the floor. I then rearranged the room, corrected the furniture, and replaced the television, so that when he woke up tucked into the quilt on his bed, the room was the same as it had been before he savaged it. I was growing concerned by his continued lack of appetite, so I carried his plate to his room myself instead of sending the maid to do it. When I entered, I found Mr. Euisdem sitting on the edge of his bed and watching the television as it played a repeating clip of the weather forecast for sometime around a decade ago. “I brought lunch,” I informed him, to no avail. I set the tray on his bed beside him and then sat down with it between us. “You can’t starve forever. I’ll have to take you back to the doctors.” “What will they do?” he asked, his voice a bit gravelly from its wear. “Inject your stomach with something, I suppose.” “Hm," he looked between me and the tray before giving in. Tasting the food seemed to double his hunger and he devoured the rest of it ravenously. “What’s in the box?” I asked curiously, once he had finished. The young man wiped the corners of his mouth on the sleeve of his flannel and turned his head. “It’s a locket and a billot-doux. Here, have a look for yourself, and I’ll tell you how I came upon it, for it is quite the peculiar tale,” he took the box from the nightstand and handed it to me. With the fervor of a bona fide raconteur, Mr. Euisdem launched himself into the story of the box, as if desperate to recount it to a fresh pair of ears. As he began, I delicately opened the lid and was met with the selcouth sight of a silver locket, shaped like a triangle, paired with a piece of paper yellowed with age and folded into quarters. “It all began with my arrival to the city. I came there looking for job opportunities, like most people did at the time, and I overheard this strange story while I was waiting on a bus. I was so mesmerized by this tale, which was one I was not meant to have heard, that I missed my bus and waited around for the next one so that I could hear the ending to it. Well, it went something like this— a while ago, perhaps a decade, there was a woman who received that letter and that locket from a man, and then the woman died of some mysterious fever a day later. After this, the locket and the letter were boxed up and put to auction with the rest of her belongings, and then— now, you won’t believe it, but this is what I heard— the person to buy the locket, a young lady drawn by the sentiment of the pair, died a day upon receiving it, too! It seemed a strange coincidence as it was, but when the locket passed hands from the buyer to her son, it was he who died next!” Mr. Eiusdem had worked himself into such a tizzy over this elaborate story that he paused for a moment to breathe. Once he had collected himself, he continued. “Now, then… The box after that was said to be cursed, and it was dropped off into the river. That was where the story ended, as I heard it at the bus stop. Now, I had a little boat of my own, and I thought I might make myself quite a bit of money if I retrieved that artifact from the river— with its singular history and whatnot— so I dedicated myself to finding it. It became an obsession of mine. All I could think about was that box and where it might be, and how I could find it, and when I finally dragged it up from the river—” He stopped suddenly and pursed his lips into a tight line. “Well, the next thing I can remember about that is ending up here.” “That would make sense.” “Why is that?” “Because this is the place of the condemned.” Mr. Euisdem narrowed his eyes. “You don’t mean to say I’m dead, do you?” “No. That strays into the supernatural far more than I’d dare go,” I replied with a shake of my head. “So what does that mean, the place of the condemned?” “Well, Mr. Euisdem, this place is here and there and nowhere at all. You see, you’ve lost your mind.”