The box sat on the table by the front door, and Andy hadn’t really though about it much. A senior in high school, he had a lot on his mind as he was about to turn 18, and the mystery a small brown package had to offer didn’t make his list of priorities. Andy was worried about his girlfriend, his popularity, his track and football career, and what school he would go to in the fall. He had decided that the selection of a university was the biggest decision he would ever be encountered with as it would shape the rest of his future. What Andy wasn’t concerned with, was the little brown box sitting on the table near his front door wrapped with brown paper and tied with twine.

He was on his way home when he got the call. Riding shotgun in his GTO, his girlfriend began to show a little leg.

“Andy, can I give you your birthday present early?” She was inching her skirt slowly toward her knees. Katie was a beautiful girl, and the whole school seemed to love her. Captain of the cheerleading squad and a good bet for valedictorian, she was the kind of girl who could get whatever she wanted, and usually did. Right now she wanted Andy.

“Now?” Andy’s mocked surprise as they frequently did it in the front seat of the GTO. Andy liked to rev the powerful engine as he watched his girl on top of him.

When they pulled off the road into a gravel side street, Katie slid her panties down around her ankles, and Andy unsnapped his dark jeans. As he began to slip his pants down toward the floorboard of the hotrod, he heard his cell phone ring.

“Don’t get it.” Katie usually had a way of being very convincing, but Andy knew she could wait a moment. Fumbling for the phone, he saw her face sadden.

“Hello,” he said had he put the phone to his ear.

“Hello, Andy.” The voice was warm, but had an eerie quality. It was a voice he had heard before, but one he couldn’t quite place. “Happy Birthday.”

“Umm…thanks.” Andy was still half avoiding the sexual advances of the beautiful girl in the seat next to him. She had begun to tease him and he slapped her hand. Giggling, she jerked it back. “Who is this?”

“This is your uncle, Andy,” the voice continued on the other end of the line. “It’s your uncle Morris.”

Andy’s mind began to work overtime as he attempted to remember what must be a long lost relative. He didn’t want to appear rude, but he had no idea who this man was. Andy began pulling up his jeans as Katie frowned.

“Of course,” Andy lied, “Uncle Morris. How are you?”

“Look, if we can keep the civilities to a minimum it would be great for us both.” The curtness of the remark took Andy by surprise. “I’m calling about my present. Did you get it?”

“Your present?” Andy was watching Katie pull up her panties, disappointed at his missed opportunity.

“I mean the brown box, Andy. Did you get it?”

He thought back to the package sitting by his front door. It had slipped his mind in the day he had received it, but the call from this man he had never heard of claiming to be his uncle renewed a spark of interest.

“Yeah, I got it.”

“Did you open it yet?”

“No, it said to wait until my birthday.” Andy didn’t really want to let on that he had completely forgotten about the present, so he played the innocent and obedient card. He was just following instructions.

“Well, it’s your birthday now, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“The gift is a right of passage, Andy,” the voice said taking on a new serious tone. “It has been passed down through the family, always given on the day of a young man’s eighteenth birthday. I hope you enjoy it.”

“Yeah,” Andy muttered, his attention for the box lost and shifting back toward the beautiful but now pouting girl next to him. “I’m sure I will.”

Katie was looking out the passenger side window. The light from neon sign was illuminating her face, its green tint giving her a sickly appearance.

“Who was so important?” She didn’t look over at her birthday boy, but sat looking straight ahead; her arms crossed delivering a stern message in body language.

“My uncle.”

“You don’t have an uncle,” Katie said, her curiosity stronger than her disappointment.

“I know.”

Andy pulled up to Katie’s house, which was just down the street from his own, and he got out in order to open the door for his cheerleader. She already had the door open and flashed him an up skirt view.

“I have a surprise for you tonight,” she said as she let him continue to gaze between her legs. “I got us a hotel room, and I will give you your present there.”

With that she stood, brushed her fingertips across the bulge in his pants, slipped a hotel key in his back pocket, and walked toward her front door.

“Seven O’clock.”

“Happy Birthday to me,” Andy whispered under his breath.

As he opened the door to his house, the words of the man on the phone echoed in his head. He wondered what that small little box could possibly contain that was so important to the voice who claimed to be his uncle. Andy had never heard of any rite of passage in his family or any traditions for a young man’s eighteenth birthday. More importantly, he had never heard of anyone named Uncle Morris.

Andy walked passed the table which cradled the small brown box and into the kitchen. As he stood in front of the open refrigerator staring at its contents, he noticed a note held in place by a ladybug magnet.

Happy Birthday Andy!
Have to work late, so we left you
money on your dresser. Have a
good time.

Love
Mom and Dad

That’s just great, Andy thought. He wasn’t expecting much from them, but at least the high priced lawyer and children’s therapist could have posed as his parents one day of the year. They missed football game after football game and track meet after track meet, but the Andy just wanted them to be there for this monumental birthday.

He had anticipated the absence of his parents, giving reason to agree to Katie’s hotel room and the surprise she would have waiting for him. Andy had taken her virginity months before so he expected sex would be part of the evening, but the couple had those grounds well taken care of. That couldn’t be the surprise. Andy knew whatever it was she was going to give him with would be definitely be a fantasy come true.

The boy stood in front of the display of food allowing the cold air to sink down and chill his sandaled toes. He wasn’t even really hungry, but found himself drawn to the fridge each afternoon when he came home whether he was hungry or not.

Suddenly, he remembered it. The rite of passage in the brown box sent by the mystery uncle he didn’t know existed. It was waiting for him on the table at the front door. His curiosity led him to the box. Its plain wrapping was a light brown perfection blemished only by the generic scribble marking its outside. Andy began to tug on the string which was tied in a simple bow around the brown paper shell, but the knot seemed to fight back. In fact, the more the boy pulled and tugged on the twine, the tighter the fibers seemed to get. It was as though the string was against the release of the package’s contents as it wound its threads tighter and tighter as the boy pulled.

Convinced that the voice on the phone had sent him some sort of joke equipped with a trick knot that could not be untied, Andy carried the box upstairs to his bedroom and tossed it onto his bed. It landed gently on his light green feather comforter as he removed his shirt, tossing it on the bed covering up the small box as it landed.

Andy had no room for puzzle ropes and mysterious rites of passage. He wasn’t a kid anymore. It was his eighteenth birthday after all, and he felt he had become a man long before.

As he stepped into the shower, his mind shifted from the little brown box to Katie. He wondered what she could possibly be planning at the hotel, a surprise he was truly interested in. Andy thought of the possibilities and it seemed like the day couldn’t fade fast enough bringing the night and Katie waiting for him in the hotel room.

Andy stood in his shower toweling off, his mind still wondering about the secret plans his date had in store for him, and out of the corner of his eye, he noticed something strange. From the shower he could see into his room care of the reflection in his bathroom mirror. Something was amiss, as he saw that things weren’t exactly as he had left them.

Wrapping the towel around his waist, Andy stepped out of the shower and headed toward his room. He looked at his bed and a tingle of fear swept through him, a feeling he hadn’t experienced in a long while. As he stared at his bed, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He rubbed his eyes a few times, blinked them profusely, and then looked again, but what he saw was really there. The shirt he had just removed lay just where he had thrown it, but it was perfectly folded. The box lay on top of it, but the string had relinquished its prisoner, and lay coiled up next to the package leaving only the brown paper to separate Andy from his gift.

“Cute.”

Remembering the knot he had decided must be some kind of a hoax, Andy chuckled to himself as he picked up the package. He turned it over and over again in his hand as he wondered how the magician had tied the string to tense up under pressure, only to give up untying itself later.

Andy examined the paper that surrounded the box more carefully now that it had shed its snake-like binds. He ran his fingers across the smooth surface as he searched his mind trying to remember any mention of a Morris or a brother at all. His mother had a sister, and his father was an only child leaving no possibility for an uncle.

Turning the package on its end, Andy noticed another peculiarity about the box. Its brown paper shell seemed to have no seams. The paper covering seemed to have no beginning or end. It was one solid fluid piece of paper the composition of which was mind boggling to the young man.

“That’s just fantastic,” Andy said sarcastically as he thought he was quickly becoming the butt of a quite elaborate prank.

As it became more and more complicated for Andy to open the brown box, his curiosity grew, and the young man was becoming eager to investigate its contents. Walking down the stairs toward the kitchen, Andy looked at the family photos hung in a neat diagonal pattern descending the steps. His feet hesitated for a moment as he passed his mother and father’s family photo’s hung side by side. His mother was sitting on a dock next to her older sister Anne and her parents. They were arranged by height as they dangled their feet into the water. The other photo was much stiffer and more rigid, as his father’s family tended to be. It looked like a painting from centuries ago as Andy’s father stood behind his father and mother. No one smiled. There was no Uncle Morris.

In the kitchen, Andy went to the drawer in which he knew the cooking shears were kept. He remembered from a freak accident when he was a little boy that they were easily the sharpest cutting utensil in the house, and he knew he would need them to slice away the peculiar brown paper that kept his treasure hidden.

He assumed that against all odds, this might be a difficult task. He wondered if he would be able to cut the paper off as he hadn’t been able to untie the twine. But his assumptions were wrong, and the silver blades tore through the paper with ease, revealing a strange wooden box. An ornate carving of what appeared to be a clown’s face was barely visible on the surface as time had almost completely sanded its ridges away. The were lines all through the box as though it were made up of many different pieces, but what caught Andy’s eye was the lack of a latch or other device to open or close the box.

“Nice present, Morris,” Andy thought as he once again chucked the gift onto his bed.

Still in his towel, Andy began to dress and prepare for his surprise evening with his girlfriend. He had been waiting for this birthday for years as it meant a new freedom. He would be off to college in the fall, but for now he was happy to be a very popular senior.

Andy smiled as he slapped on the new bottle of aftershave he had purchased the day before. He knew it was Katie’s favorite. She once told him it drove her wild. Los in the memory of his girl, Andy sat back onto the bed, his weight crashing down on the impossible wooden box he had received in the mail.

“Shit!” Andy said as one of the box’s hard points dug into his spine. He rolled over to find the box in a bit different state than he remembered. Much like a chocolate orange, his weight had smashed the wooden box, and it began to fall apart at each of the lines that zigzagged across its surface. Once again intrigued by the box, Andy began to pull the wooden pieces off one by one like he was peeling a banana. The inside of the box was hollow, and he found a velvet pouch tied neatly with a satin ribbon. On the ribbon hung a small tag with read:

For Your Eighteenth.

Happy Birthday,

Morris

The satin ties that bound the velvet pouch together must have been made by a much kinder creator as the knot fell apart with ease. Andy, holding the small pouch at the bottom dumped the contents into the palm of his hand.

What spilled out was a disappointment. In a rite of passage, Andy expected a ring, a diamond, something of value, but not this. In his hand he held a small pin. It was clearly very old, as its hand painted tin surface was beginning to flake off. The pin was in the shape of a clown, similar to the one on the front of the puzzle box. He had red hair and a red nose, and really looked like any generic clown except for one thing. He wasn’t smiling.

“That’s just great,” Andy said as he held the pin in his hand. “Just what I wanted.”

But the young man remembered that he would be getting exactly what he wanted later at the hotel room, and his parents had left him some money on their dresser. He found it next to another note exactly like the one he had found on the fridge, except it was in his dad’s handwriting. Shuffling through the money, he found it to be 500 dollars, quite a generous sum compared to what he was accustomed to receiving, but he was an adult now after all, and he should be prepared for things to change.

The hours before he was to leave for the hotel seemed to drag on and on as the boy felt he would be 100 before he could leave. The surprise was driving him crazy. What could it be? His mind was running wild as he sat and watched the red numbers on the digital clock by his bed click away.

His thoughts, while they should have been focused on the scantily clad blonde patiently awaiting his arrival at the hotel, kept shifting back toward the pin that he realized he was running through his fingers as he lay on his bed, biding his time to depart. He didn’t remember picking the pin up, but it was there now as he ran his fingers across its cold surface. He noticed the clasp in the back was unique as it didn’t seem to have a way to fasten itself behind the fabric of its wearer’s shirt. The short spike seemed to be inadequate to do the job, but Andy didn’t care. It wasn’t like he wanted this ugly clown pin.

He felt a sort of energy through the cold tin that he pressed between his fingers. Andy had to admit he was intrigued by this object that rest in his hand. It came in such a peculiar package from an unknown sender—a sender who had Andy’s cell phone number.

More out of boredom than anything else, the young man picked himself off his bed, and stood up in front of the mirror. He carefully tousled his hair until it was just the right amount of messy, and then locked his masterpiece into place with a can of hair spray. After straightening his collar, and tucking in his shirt, he was completely ready to go.

Andy realized as he stood that he was still clutching the small metal clown in his hand. He felt its energy like a tiny pulse beating through him and he was compelled to bring it up to his chest. He placed the small spike next to his collar, a place he thought he might wear the pin if he actually liked it, and he examined the sad faced clown next to his shirt.

As though it has some sort of magnetic powers, the pin jerked its small spike in toward Andy’s neck. Surprised by the sudden movement, Andy dropped the pin which held fast to its position in the collar. Suddenly, the young man felt pain like he had never felt. The pin began to work its way in though his shirt and he could feel the pin’s cold prick as it began to tear into the warm flesh on his neck.

Andy dropped to his knees, clutching at the pin as it dug into his flesh. The spike seemed to grow as it penetrated deeper and deeper, until Andy thought it might come out the other side of his throat. The tin lodged in his flesh seemed to expand, cutting off his air and piercing his vocal chords taking away his ability to scream. He could see himself in the mirror as he floundered around on the floor of his bedroom gasping for air. His face was turning blue, and just before he passed out, he could see the clown now deeply rooted throughout his body, and the clown was smiling.

When the young man awoke, he climbed from the floor and sat on the edge of his bed. His body felt drained, as he wrest his hand on his knees. He felt the pin prick in his neck but the clown was gone. He was released from the grasp of that hideous piece of metal, but the image of that smiling face so close to his own as he gasped for air was one Andy would not soon forget.

The young man ran down the stairs toward the kitchen. Anxious to get some ice for his pierced neck and then be off to his sexual fantasy, he didn’t notice the change. The family photos still hung in their neat diagonal pattern as the descended the stairs. They were looking over him as he put on his letter jacket and fumbled for his keys in the entry way. They watched as he walked through the door. Andy hadn’t noticed the change. He hadn’t noticed that standing beside his father in the rigid and stiff photo from what looked like centuries ago was Uncle Morris, and he was smiling.

The GTO rumbled in the driveway as Andy pumped the gas. He gave himself two squirts of breath spray, allowed himself to admire his perfectly mussed hair in the side mirror, and he turned to back out of the driveway.

The roads were a bit damp as it must have rained while Andy had been out. He thought about the pin’s assault and realized how silly he had been to let himself be scared by it. He was just about to come to the conclusion the he had dreamt the whole thing when he felt a warm liquid trickle down his neck.

“Shit,” he said as he placed his fingers in the liquid and realized it was blood. The pain was gone, but Andy really didn’t want to ruin the brand new shirt he was wearing for the first time that evening.

Pulling the GTO into the driveway of a gas station, Andy became frantic about the wound.

“Come on.” He was getting frustrated. “Not on the car.”

Andy found a piece of paper on the floorboard, unusual for how clean he usually kept the ride, and clamped it firmly to his neck in an attempt to save his shirt and upholstery. Just as he was about to step out of the car, he noticed it had begun to rain again.

“Shit,” he thought. This birthday was becoming quite the headache. He quickly made his way into the station, trying in vain to shelter his hair with one hand while holding the paper to his neck with the other.

A small bell rang as he stepped in through the door of the shop which alerted the small man behind the counter. He stood behind a sheet of bullet proof glass gnawing on a piece of beef jerky. A green trucker’s cap, which threatened to swallow the man’s oversized ears, crowned the small man’s head.

“You the one supposed to meet your Uncle Morris?” He squeaked from behind his protective barrier. He never stopped chomping on his jerky.

“What’d you just say?” The annoyance was quickly turning to fear as he realized the hoax was going too far.

“Excuse me?”

Andy blinked and saw the comically small man was gone, and in his place was a large black man. The trucker’s hat was resting on a dummy head on the counter with a cardboard sign advertising its 5 dollar price. His eyes must be playing tricks on him.

“Umm…nothing,” Andy stammered looking around for the restroom as he tried to keep his bleeding neck as inconspicuous as possible. “Can I use your restroom?”

The man didn’t even look up from his sports page as he pointed back toward a door on the back wall. Andy quickly darted between the racks of motor oil and children’s cassette tapes toward the bathroom where he could hopefully clean up his neck.

Grabbing a box of band aids on the way, he looked back at the counter. The tiny man stood in front of the glass. He was just watching Andy expressionless as the large black man read his newspaper. Andy thought he might be losing it.

The bathroom was well stocked with tissue and paper towels, and Andy began to work on his situation. He dropped the temporary paper bandage he had found on the floorboard and replaced it with some tissue. As he reached for the box of band aids he had left on the edge of the sink, he clumsily knocked them to the floor. Reaching down to pick them up, Andy froze with fear. His hand outstretched to retrieve the box of band aids, he recognized the paper he had been using as a temporary bandage. The paper he had picked off the floorboard of his car was the same paper he had torn from the box in his kitchen. It even had the same average scrawl.

He picked up the paper, his hands shaking beyond control.

“What the hell is happening to me?” he thought as examined the writing on the paper. Throwing it in the trash, he reached into his pocket for his cell phone, but what he found instead rocked his body with terror. He felt the small spike against the tip of his finger, and knew it was the pin he had thought he must have created in his dreams. He pulled it out of his pocket, and stared at the smiling clown’s face.

Andy stood up shaking. He looked into the mirror, and nothing could have prepared him for what he would see. He stood staring at the smooth reflective surface above the bathroom sink, and staring back at him was the most hideous figure he had ever seen. A face of rotting flesh carelessly covered with the make up of a clown had taken the place of his own reflection. His hair was an excruciating blaze of burning cells, and his clown’s nose didn’t quite cover the decaying hole underneath.

Andy collapsed onto the floor, but he could still see the clown in the mirror looking down at him. Flies carried a stench from deep within his throat as his guttural voice seeped out from behind his rotten molars.

“What’s the matter Andy?” The voice pierced the boy’s mind as he recognized it from the phone earlier. “It’s just your Uncle Morris.”

As the pounding shook his body, Andy let out a scream.

“What the fuck’s going on in there, man?” The voice and the pounding came from the other side of the bathroom door. Andy stood and the clown was gone. There was no burning hair or rotting face, and in fact there was no blood on his shirt. The pounding had released Andy from his trance. “You doin’ drugs in there?”

“No,” Andy mouthed the words but was uncertain if they came out. He longed for an explanation as simple as drugs. “No, I’m done.”

He opened the bathroom door to find the large gas station attendant furiously waiting.

“Get outta here.”

Andy quickly walked out of the gas station. He loved his GTO, but was never happier to get that powerful machine running and out on the street. Andy thought he was cracking up. He just needed to get to the hotel room. He needed his Katie. As he fumbled in his pockets for the hotel key, he didn’t notice the clown nose resting on the seat next to him.

He swung the door to the hotel open and startled his sleeping girlfriend.

“Hey baby,” she said. “You’re late.”

Andy began to relax a bit as he saw his girl. He could see she was naked underneath a lacy nightgown. The room was decorated with candles and rose petals, and next to the bed were all sorts of oils and toys. But one thing in the room sparked his interest more than any of this. He knew it was the long anticipated surprise, and when he saw it, he was almost able to put aside the thoughts of his weird birthday present.

At the foot of the bed was a camera mounted on a tripod. It was aimed at his girlfriend who was already seductively teasing him.

“I though we could make a movie,” she said biting on her lip a bit. “Happy Birthday.”

She had hit the nail on the head with this present, and he was completely speechless. But what about what he had seen that day? What about the strange occurrences that he couldn’t explain? He told himself he must have been dreaming, that it could wait if only for a few hours, but he didn’t know if it could.

“I don’t know baby,” he said looking at the floor. She looked as though she were going to cry.

“What’s wrong,” she asked playfully sticking out her chest as she spoke. “You’re not in the mood?”

“No, I want to,” Andy said, his mind still reeling from the events of the afternoon. “Just give me a minute.”

With that he closed the door to the bathroom behind him disappearing in the kind of rejection that he had never presented Katie with before. As she sat, a little hurt, on the bed, Andy stood in the bathroom. His hands were shaking, and he splashed some water on his face.

“No clowns,” he whispered as he stared into the mirror. As he fished into his pocket, he found only his cell phone. There was no strange clown pin waiting to fuse its cold metal with his flesh. It was gone. “Just enjoy the best night of your life.”

As he swung the bathroom door back open, the light from the candles warmed the room. He could see his beautiful girlfriend patiently waiting on the bed. She was rubbing oil on her long legs.

“Everything ok, baby?” She had put away her sexy voice and exchanged it for one of genuine concern.

“Yeah, you look real good, Katie.”

“Come see how I feel.”

And the troubles were over. Convinced that he must have had a bad food reaction or just a brief brain spasm of some kind, Andy put the memories of the day behind him as he allowed Katie to undress him.

“Let me turn on the camera,” she said, bouncing toward the foot of the bed. She turned the viewfinder around, so that the couple could see the images that the camera was capturing and what it wasn’t, and then she brought her sexy voice back. “Action.”

She threw him down and straddled him, positioning him for a back massage. Andy closed his eyes to enjoy the pampering.

“Naughty Boy.” It was just a whisper, but Andy heard it.

“What?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Katie said as she kneaded the tough muscles on his back.

“You’ve been naughty, Andy.”

Andy eye’s burst open as he recognized the voice. He knew the coldness of it, the intrusive all knowingness. Andy looked up at the camera. He could just barely make out the image in the viewfinder. He saw Katie still clad in her lacey nightly, hair over her face as she struggled to work his back muscles. He saw his own face, eyes wild, an uncomprehending vessel of insanity.

Then he saw the third figure. He could smell the breath as he laid so still, Katie’s hands on his back, but when his eyes adjusted to the view finder, he was certain. He saw the rotting flesh, and the flaming hair, the flies and the decaying nose, but this time, the image was different. This time it wasn’t an addition to a family photo. It wasn’t a reflection in a mirror. When he heard the booming cackle of laughter omit from behind him, he was positive this time it was real, and it was in the room with them.

Andy, paralyzed by fear, couldn’t bring himself to take his eyes off the creature he saw in the small screen on the side of the camera. He watched as it pulled Katie off him, laughing the whole time, as he could feel the rotting flesh brushing against his legs. He watched as the monster swung something large and heavy, crushing the side of his skull.

Everything was black.

When he awoke, he couldn’t move. He was sure he was tied to a gurney and he could hear walkie-talkies and general medical chatter.

“Oh! What a smell. You just never get used to it, do you?” The voice came from a cop who held a handkerchief over his nose. “What a sick fuck!”

Andy wasn’t sure what was going on. He managed to turn his head toward the bed. The last thing he remembered was his beautiful girlfriend seductively teasing him, but now all he saw was a sheet that was once white soaked in blood, and sticking out from underneath, was the rotting foot of a young girl.

“So we gather that the blood’s all his, Detective,” Andy heard another voice say. “The girl’s been dead a while. Must be some kind of sadistic self mutilation, and look, he videotaped the whole thing.”

Andy was suddenly aware of the cuts and scrapes all over his body. He lifted one hand to see no fingernails and only three fingers.

“The girl was his girlfriend?” Andy heard the Detective ask. “She’s the one that’s been missing?”

“That’s correct sir.”

Andy began to remember the events of the day before. He thought of the clown, and the phone call, the rotting figure in the mirror and the monster in the view finder. His mind whirred with confusion.

“Here’s the clown nose and wig sir,” a rookie cop yelled from the bathroom. “Just like the witnesses said.”

“We got our boy,” the detective murmured on his way out the hotel room door.

Andy closed his eyes again, completely at a loss for what could have possibly happened. His body was overwhelmed and began to give out when he heard a commotion coming down the hall.

“Sir you can’t go in there! Sir, please!”

“It’s ok, I’m his family.”

Andy picked up his other hand to assess more damage. He couldn’t feel it at all, but he knew it must still be there. As he raised it within view, he began to choke as what he saw.

“Sir are you his father?”

Clutched in his bloody right hand was the box he had received the day before. The lines still zigging and zagging their way across its wooden surfaces, but there was one difference. The ornate carving of the clown had been removed and in its place was a carving of Katie, looking beautiful in her lacey nightgown. Andy turned to look at the rotting flesh under the sheet on the bed, and he understood.

“Sir, I said are you the father?”

“No…No, I’m his uncle,” the voice said. “I’m his Uncle Morris.”