Chapter One
I’d felt dread the minute Alejandro and I entered Cleo’s apartment. Her face was sallow, stricken; she looked like a thousand ghosts had poured through her, like time itself had come for a final reckoning. I closed my eyes. I could feel something at the barest edge of my senses. Something powerful. I moved further into the ghost at my side, wanting to know more about why they were here, but they faded back into that whispering gray purgatorial world I had only witnessed in dreams.
Cleo had handed me the listing a few minutes after we’d settled in.
Dybbuk Box for sale.
WARNING: This is not a plaything. It is possessed.
This object sat in my great-great-grandmother’s closet for years. Got curious one day and decided to try to open it. That’s when scary stuff started happening. I’d find scratches all down my legs, my back. I’d wake up to moaning noises, and the room would be freezing. Violent thoughts started to come into my brain, and I’m not like that. The lights in the house started flickering. I didn’t connect it to the box until my mother came by and said that her mom had put it away after the same stuff had happened to her. She told me my ancestor called whatever was in the box “the cursed one.” Sometimes I hear noises from the box. I just want to sell it to someone who knows what to do with it.
$50 OBO.
Per eBay Policy this object is for “entertainment purposes.”
The box from the listing she’d found on eBay was black, covered in thick gray dust—it felt sticky, cobwebby. The touch revolting. There were waxy strings holding the lid down and a large, ornate, black lock.
I glanced briefly up at the streetlights through the frosty window, the snow blowing in blue streaks beneath them. It was coming down like mad, the roads covered in gray-brown slush from a late spring snow.
“Just breathe, Olivia,” Alejandro said, patting my hand.
I blinked. Glanced down. My hand was clenched around the listing. “Sorry,” I said, releasing it to the coffee table. I hadn’t wanted to take anything on this week.
“It’s okay,” Cleo said, running one freckled hand through her hair, her eyes flitting briefly to the window, then back over to me. The snow had started to fall even more rapidly, the sky a mass of white.
“So, when did all of this start?” I asked, picking up the mug she’d poured for me when we’d first come in.
“About a week after I got it in the mail. Like I said over the phone, the minute I saw it, I had to have it, there was just something that drew me—I thought it sounded neat.”
“Neat,” I echoed.
Most of the paranormal listings on eBay were haunted dolls, written about in inarticulate script, clearly playing off the popularity of the Conjuring films. This object, however, was unique.
“Go on,” Alejandro said. He generally let me lead the questioning. Sometimes, however, he questioned while I looked around—let my mind search. Though Alejo did a lot of the day-to-day things, like keep our calendar, I needed him with me on gigs to make sure that if I went off the edge, I had someone there to catch me. My mind was strong. But when you were clairvoyant, spirits—or anything else—could get in. And you wouldn’t know until it was too late.
“Then it was little things,” she said, continuing. She sipped at her coffee, and I could see her hands trembling. “I couldn’t find Mousey. I got him when he was a kitten, just a tiny black ball of fur.” She smiled, a small, weak smile. “Then, like in the listing, I’d wake up hearing noises. Moaning. And then the scratches started. I finally found Mousey under the bed—but I couldn’t get him out. He stayed under literally all the time. I tried to throw the box out. I put it in the dumpster outside, but…”
“Please, continue,” Alejo prompted once more.
“It reappeared. The next day—on my kitchen counter,” she said, her voice shaking. “And there was a note on top of it.”
I squinted, leaned in.
“It said, ‘There is no escaping your bloodline.’”
That was interesting.
I sat back, still wondering if for all my instinct, I’d misread her, and this wasn’t evidence of a psychic break. Stuff started going wrong in their heads, and then they’d find something to make what was happening real. The problem was, when it was real, sometimes it was because the entity—which was almost always a ghost—had found a vulnerability and wormed its way in.
“I have to ask you something,” I said, smiling reassuringly. “And I don’t want you to take offense.”
She nodded, the corners of her mouth turning down, her eyes narrowing.
“Do you have a history of mental health issues?”
She went pale, then her face turned a shade of pink, then red. “Are you calling me crazy? This is for real. I’m scared for real. That thing”—she paused to point at it—“is possessed. There’s like, a demon or something in it. And I don’t appreciate you questioning my sanity, when it took everything I had to call you.” She stood up, her legs trembling, her eyes filling with tears.
“Sweetie, sweetie.” Alejandro got up and walked over to her, sat down, and patted the seat next to him. “No one thinks you’re crazy, which is like, a totally shitty word anyway.”
Her shoulders relaxed a bit then, and she sighed, roughing the tears from her face with a forearm.
“And like, I’m on fluoxetine? So, if anyone’s crazy here, mija, it’s me. Maybe it’s because I majored in English, and all that poetry screwed with my head,” he continued, and patted the seat where she’d been again. “Like all that Poe? Black.”
She laughed despite herself, and Alejandro handed her a tissue. She sniffled and dabbed at her eyes, clutched the tissue in her fingers, sat back down, and clasped her hands in her lap. “I’m sorry. It’s just. I’m not sleeping, you know?”
“It’s okay, it’s really okay,” I said, and Alejandro patted her shoulder.
“I don’t,” she said after a few minutes. “I mean, I don’t have a history with depression. Or like, any mental illnesses. Not that I’m criticizing,” she said, her head jerking over to Alejandro.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m gay. We’re like, required to be a little mental, given the meathead homophobes we deal with in this world,” he said, rolling his eyes.
She laughed again, her hand over her lips. Then she sighed heavily. “I did go through some therapy when my dad died. That was rough. I was close to him—and my mom. And there were times…” she said, her eyes going distant, “I thought…”
“Go on, we’re not judging you,” I said.
“I thought that I, well, not that I saw him? But that I felt him in the room. I smelled him, smelled his cologne. It took me a long time to get over that.” She giggled nervously. “But then I did. And I was fine. I was a cheerleader and everything. Had straight As. Went to CU.”
That was how it had gotten in. That little, dark, black hole inside of her.
“I get it. My dad died too,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Cancer,” I volunteered.
“Mine was a car accident,” she said, one finger brushing lightly over her mug.
“Were you in the car?”
“Yeah,” she whispered, the finger stilling.
We were silent for a beat.
“You want me to get you more coffee?” she asked, running one hand through her pale, greasy hair.
“Sure.”
When she got back, she continued. “So, after the moaning, the scratching, the lights flickering, and then, like, this feeling. This feeling of foreboding. And I don’t know how else to describe it,” she said, clutching her hand to her chest, the tissue still trapped between her fingers. “This feeling of doom and darkness in my heart—and, oddly enough, guilt—that’s when it got real. That’s when I started to see things.”
I let her go on. Alejandro took her hand, and she smiled at him, swallowed.
“I’d wake up, and I was standing in front of the mirror, in the bathroom. I don’t sleepwalk?” She cleared her throat, twisted the tissue. “Then it got so much worse. I’d wake up, and behind me, I’d see him. I’d see Daddy.”
She started crying in earnest then, and Alejandro rubbed her back, shushed her gently. We let her cry it out. “But it wasn’t him. His eyes…” she said, trailing off. She shook her head. “And then I began waking up in front of the mirror—with a knife in my hand.”
Jesus Christ.
“That’s when I started searching for help—for, you know, paranormal investigators. Mostly what I found looked scammy. But you two, it was clear from your website that you’re the real thing. Plus, you have really good reviews on Yelp,” she said, ending with a small, uncomfortable chuckle.
She sniffled again, blew her nose, and Alejandro gave her another tissue from the weirdly never-ending supply that he kept in his messenger bag.
“Alejandro, could you hand me the sweetgrass? The shell?” I asked.
He nodded, pulled the flap of his bag, and handed me my materials. There was holy water as well, just in case. I never knew what I was going to be dealing with.
“Oh, the candles too.”
Alejandro handed each object to me with a cloth, and I set them out, my hands folding them down in the proper way. I sat back. “I want to be clear. This is a ceremony, this is not some kind of play Indian thing. I am not a traditional medicine person, and I’m definitely not a priest,” I said, chuckling darkly. “But this is how I know how to respectfully communicate with the dead. My family was tradish, then Catholic, then Native American Church. This is what I know, who I am.”
Cleo blinked a few times, then nodded.
“And the only reason I’m taking payment? Is because I need to eat to live.”
She nodded again. “Do I need to do something?”
“Just take deep breaths. Focus on something in the room that makes you happy. Focus on a memory that makes you happy.”
Alejandro lit the sage and let it burn until it was creating a steady stream of smoke, and we motioned the smoke over ourselves, cleansing. I told Cleo to do the same.
I sat back. Worked hard to clear my head.
Alejandro dimmed the lights, lit the black-flowered candles—my hope being that the spirit would be drawn to the flickering light, and that the light would lead it to the other world.
I closed my eyes. At first, nothing.
“Is this working?” Cleo whispered. Alejandro quietly asked her to keep silent. To focus. To let me focus.
I could hear doors opening and closing throughout the complex. Laughter outside. I closed my eyes again. Thought about Cleo. The box. It had such strange energy. The building went silent again. And I waited. Kept an image of the box in my mind, of Cleo’s guilt. There was something in that, something … inside. I felt a breeze, a light, cold breeze. I knew that the windows were shut. The breeze grew, and I heard distant sounds of women and children. I strained to hear what they were saying, leaned forward into the dark wind of my vision, and it came, clear, grew louder. They were screaming.
“Oh my God,” Cleo said, and Alejandro shushed her quietly.
“There is someone here. Something … trapped in the box,” I said, leaning in, opening my eyes. I stared at the box. I could feel it now. A presence. Not masculine … not exactly feminine. And anger. Oh, such anger and grief, it was overwhelming, my chest growing tight. I could hear whispering coming from it—desperate, furious whispering, in a language I only faintly recognized. I strained to listen, to understand. There was so much fire in that voice.
Alejandro was beside me now.
A bolt of blue light began pooling around the box, swirling. I began to pray in Apache, prayers for peace.
The blue light fired from the box and hit me. I rocked back.
“Oh my God!” Cleo squealed, standing up.
“No, no—sit down, let her do what she needs to do,” Alejandro said, but I could hear the fear in his voice.
The being swirled around me, nearly inside me.
“They … their name is Nese. This means two,” I said. “They were two-spirit. They were … a sacred person. Cheyenne. They were killed at the Massacre…” I focused as hard as I could, closing my eyes to concentrate. Oh, God, the images. I was going to be sick. The violence. The sheer, unadulterated cruelty. I’d read about this countless times, but to watch it hit me so far down deep, I wasn’t sure I’d ever recover. My eyes flew open just as the lights snapped back on, and the box flew over to the wall, smashing into it, over and over, as if it was trying to break itself open.
Cleo began moaning, Alejandro telling her that she had to remain calm or this wouldn’t work at all. The moans diminished to whimpers.
“Nese, why are you in a dybbuk box?” I asked.
Copyright © 2025 by Erika T. Wurth
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