The chill, damp London air clung to my coat like a diseased miasma. Grime and filth caked the cracks in the cobbles, slick and grimy beneath my boots. A woman who might have charitably been called a leper cajoled to me from the entrance to an alleyway. I hate London.

“C’mon love, two shillings and I’ll treat you right and proper.”

I ignored her and kept walking. 

Have I mentioned that I hate London? 

I arrived with little difficulty – aside from the assault on my senses and decency – to Carruthers’s Coinpurse. A dealer in antiquities, Jonathon Carruthers and I have done good business in the past, an arrangement that served us both well. A bell jingled overhead as I opened the door.

As always, walking into the Coinpurse involved a barrage of sights, sounds, and smells that were as intriguing as they were concerning. A large glass jar of brown powder, proclaiming to be genuine Egyptian mummy. An exotic bird from the tropics with what had once been a beautiful, colorful plumage, now half bald and trembling in a cage. Frogs hanging from the ceiling, gently desiccating in the haze of incense and fire smoke. 

I coughed, both to clear my throat and to announce my arrival. Mr. Carruthers looked up from his copy of Dickens and adjusted the delicate pince-nez perched on his bulbous, gin-soaked snoz. 

“Ah, if it isn’t Mr. Breckenridge, welcome, welcome. I am relieved to see you have received my letter. I do hope your travels have been profitable? I understand you’ve just come back from Cathay? Have you anything from the Orient? My collection is quite lacking for artifacts from that region.”

I sighed and reached into my satchel, retrieving a delicately lacquered set of tea cups, each carefully wrapped in waxed parchment. I set them on the counter and watched as the man greedily tore away the wrappings, discarding them on the floor without a second thought. I hated the man almost as much as I hated London, but his coin was good and my travels had left my own coinpurse rather light.

“Those Chinamen are frightfully good craftsmen,” he said, eyeing the cups. 

“These were given to me by a Japanese viscount, actually. Bloody good tea.”

“Japanese? What’s the difference?”

“Nothing to you, I suppose,” I replied, stifling a brief flash of irritation. “It matters little, I told him about my dear friend Jonathon Carruthers, who is an aficionado of all things beautiful, and he insisted I bring you these as a gift.” A lie, but a harmless one. They were a gift, but one of a more polite nature than heartfelt. 

Carruthers slipped the cups behind the counter and retrieved a small box, carefully wrapped in parchment and tied securely with twine.

“Well, anyways, back to business, lad. As you recall from my letter, a chap came here about a fortnight ago with this parcel. He said it needed to go Michael Faraday, that quack tinker, but he could not go himself on account of his, well, poor reputation. I told him I have just the man for the job.”

I eyed the parcel, one eyebrow raised.

“What is it?”

“No idea,” replied Carruthers, shrugging. “He said that only a professional can take it though, very valuable.”

“And you didn’t think to take a peek?” I inquired skeptically. Carruthers gave me a reproachful look about as genuine as a three-pence piece. 

“What do I look like, a man of ill repute?”

I let the question hang in the air.

“All right, all right, I did go to take a peek, you know me, Patrick, my bloody curiosity will be the death of me. But it’s the damndest thing; every time I went to untie the strings, I would remember something quite pressing that needed my immediate attention. The first few times, I attributed it to coincidence, but after eight attempts, I’ve simply given up.”

I stared at him incredulously.

“You…remembered something…important?” I sputtered, for once at a loss for words. It was preposterous. “Surely you can simply decide to ignore such remembrances?”

“Aye, I thought so as well around the fifth attempt. It is a queer phenomenon. I can’t explain it. I know how it sounds. Anyways, I am glad you’ve arrived, I shall be quite glad to be rid of it.”

I poked experimentally at the box. It was a small thing, and quite light. No more than eight inches in length and width, and five tall. 

“And for the delivery fee?”

“Arranged with Mr. Faraday, according to the chap.”

“Why hasn’t Mr. Faraday simply come for the box himself?”

“Again, reputation, lad. For a man as travelled as you are, you can be quite dense at times.” Carruthers laughed, a guttural, barking sound. “Imagine, Michael Faraday coming to Cheapside and frequenting my shop. Will wonders never cease.”

I reluctantly picked up the package and placed it in my satchel. 

“Very well. A pleasure as always, Mr. Carruthers.”

“Yes, yes. Watch your back out there, Patrick, they say there’s a ripper out there, killing whores. Slashing their throats and leaving them dead in the streets.”

“I suppose it is well that I am not a whore then,” I replied, turning to leave the shop as Carruthers let out another bellowing barrage of barking laughter. With that distasteful interaction complete, I stepped back out into the foul London night.

A fine drizzle of rain had begun to patter down, and while miserable cold, it did at least ease the fog of stench assaulting my nostrils. The more I travelled, the less I enjoyed the cramped, filthy cities of mother England and the unwashed masses that inhabited it.

“Ah, but no amount of travel can make you stink less yourself, Englishman,” said a voice at my side. I stopped in my tracks, my hand already on the butt of my pistol. 

“You find me at a disadvantage sir,” I said carefully, slowly turning my head; I had not heard the click of a hammer being drawn, so I could at least conclude that there was not a gun pointed at my head. Still, a length of stove wood would do me in just as dead. 

When I turned, however, I saw nothing. Nothing but the same dreary greyblack stones of the dirty buildings closing in from all sides. Forgoing caution, I quickly spun in place, looking for the speaker and finding no-one but myself. 

“Who’s there?” I asked, my voice calm but my heart frenetic and wild within my ribcage. There came no response but the sound of my breathing, swallowed by the increasingly heavy rainfall. Slowly, I released my grip on the pistol, pulled up my collar to keep the worst of the rain out, and resumed my midnight march.

Queer. The whole thing was queer, and I did not like it one bit. That voice had rung out as clear as a bell, but there was no person beside me, no flap of footfalls on the cobbles, no rustling from the shadows. A voice with no body, a slight with no slighter. 

Michael Faraday lived across the city, and I wanted to be rid of my cargo and back in my lodgings, which were comfortable and dry, if modest. First thing tomorrow, I promised myself, I would take a train out of England. Perhaps it was time to visit Calcutta. Perhaps Constantinople. Perhaps I would even take a voyage to the Americas; I had been to some of the American port cities (if one could call those derelict slums cities), but the western frontier promised to be full of adventure. Anything but this awful city. By God, I hated London.

“A spot of adventure might be just the thing,” said the voice from nowhere. “Take me to America. It will be quite the interesting place soon. I want to go on an adventure.”

Once more, I stood still, the blood draining from my face.

“It is a shame you won’t be alive to see the really amazing things. In 1969, an American will be the first human being to set foot on the moon. A desolate, cold place. No idea why they would want to go there, but it is still rather impressive for a bunch of drunken animals.”

The words in my ears were no sly whispering, no creeping madness. They were as benignly boring and mundane as a conversation with an acquaintance. The banality of it was the most terrifying aspect. I had always assumed losing my mind would be more, romantic somehow. A seductive sliding away of reality instead of this utterly normal descent.

“You aren’t mad, you fool. In all of your wanderings, have you truly never stumbled across something that defied explanations? When you travelled with those Romani, did you not see their magics and their portents?”

Ignoring my better judgement, I engaged the unseen speaker.

“Magics? So the legion of card-shuffling charlatans plaguing the pockets of Cheapside simpletons are magicians and warlocks, then?”

The voice laughed, and there was something about that laugh that chilled the blood in my heart. It was black and filled with gravel, like dirt thrown upon a coffin.

“Nay, not the slights of hand they use to lighten a purse. You know what I’m speaking of, boy.”

And the worst part was, I did. I remembered walking back to my tent, stumbling due to the darkness and the strong liquor my new friends had plied me with, and as I moved past the wagon of one of the caravan’s elders, I remember seeing her holding a dead crow, blood dripping from its neck and into a dented tin basin. I remember averting my eyes, my face burning with the shame of having seen some private thing, a ritual not meant for foreign eyes. Before I could though, the old woman had pierced me with her gaze and spoke to me, had called out to me in her native tongue, the words dread and filled with import. The voice chuckled again.

“Would you like to know what she said to you?”

“Do you speak the Gypsy tongue, oh unseen thing?” I scoffed.

“I speak all tongues, human. All that have been spoken and all that will be spoken. I am the seer of the unseen, the speaker of the unspoken.”

“What are you?” I asked, unable to keep a tremor out of my voice.

“I am the alpha and omega. I am legion. I am beautiful and terrible as the morning and the night. I am become death, eater of worlds. See me and despair.” A gust of ice-cold wind swirled around my boots, pelting me with fat drops of frigid rain. I swallowed convulsively and forced myself to still my trembling limbs.

“So far as I can tell, you are a voice in a box. Not so much terrible about that, is there?” I replied, hoping I sounded braver than I felt. “Suppose I decide to just drop this box in the Thames and be done with the whole mess?”

The awful laughter bubbled up from the ether. When it spoke again, it did so with an accent I was unfamiliar with.

“Well shoot, pardner, I reckon your balls might be too big for your britches. I ain’t had a time this fine in years. Most people can’t even hear me, and you just gone and laid down the law. Yeah, you can throw me in that there river down yonder, but you sure I won’t be there in your dreams, hoss? I know your name, Patrick Breckenridge. That means I know you. Born 1852 in Lanarkshire, Scotland. Parents died from cholera when you was a boy. Moved to London to live with your uncle, Robbie. He beat you till you shoved a pistol under his nose and left. Damn, kid, I do love the moxie. Do you want to know when you’re gonna die? I can tell you. I know. I know so many things, pardner.”

I was breathing, I think, but it seemed to be occurring from somewhere quite far away. My head swam and my vision swirled with blooming spots of flashing darkness. Impossible. What the voice told me was impossible, but only because it was true. Every word of it was true. 

“All you gotta do it open the box pardner. Open it. I can show you everything. Everything you ever wanted to know. Just open it. Open it.”

I looked down, somehow not surprised to see I was holding the box in my hands. I had no recollection of pulling it free, and yet there it was, with one end of the bow knot already in my fingers. 

“No!” I shouted, dropping the box and clenching my hands into fists so hard I could feel the nails of my fingers cutting into the palms of my hands. When I opened my eyes, I could see small rivulets of scarlet seeping from between my bone-white knuckles. The box lay on the ground, unopened, the knot still in place. And the voice was gone. 

I do not know how long I stood there, thinking. Oh, how I longed to turn tail and flee from the infernal thing, flee to the nearest church and bend the knee in supplication to our Lord Jesus for salvation, for surely Satan lived in that cursed artifact. In fact, I had even managed to take two halting steps backwards, when it occurred to me: should I leave the box there, what would stop some innocent Cheapside urchin from picking it up. And, my God, open the thing? I remember growing up on those mean streets, and I knew without doubt that would be the very first thing they did. And the damnation of that soul would stain my hands for the rest of my days.

I am not an overly religious man. In my travels, I have observed many customs and rites that would seem queer and heathenistic to my fellow countrymen, but I have never judged them, for surely mine own customs must seem barbaric to them as theirs did to me. But deep in my bones, I knew that whatever this object was, it was damned, and would lead its possessor to damnation with it. 

Miserable, I turned back and retrieved the box. Even in the autumnal chill of midnight London, the box was cold to the touch. I endeavored to take it, not to Michael Faraday, but to St. Mary-le-Bow, and let the clergy sort it out. 

“That wouldn’t be very fun, love,” said the box as I took my first steps towards the church. Now it spoke with the voice of the woman from earlier, the prostitute who had solicited me. “We can have a fine time without them stuffy rotters. Here, I’ll give ye a little taste, love.”

The voice changed again, and this time I could not stop a choked sob of horror from escaping my lips.

“A Phàdraig, a mhic, an tusa sin? Tha e fuar. Chan fhaic mi thu, a ghràidh. Càit a bheil thu?” It was my mother’s voice, speaking Gàidhlig, her mother tongue that she slipped into when she was worried. I had not heard the language since I was a boy, but I still remembered it. Patrick, my son, is that you? I’m cold. I can’t see you, my love. Where are you?

“You aren’t my mother. That is a foul trick to play, devil.” 

It laughed, the sound grating against my soul.

“Maybe it’s your mother, maybe it ain’t, love. But you won’t know unless you open yon box, aye?” 

“I will not open the damned box!” I shouted, horrified to realize I had already pulled one string free from the not. Horrified, I shoved it back into my pack and began to run through the streets, ignoring the voice as it cajoled me, temped me, threatened me, mocked me. But at last I stood before the church. By then the rain was coming down in earnest, a deluge of sleet that scoured all sensation from my face. Half-frozen slurry pooled against my neck in my upfolded collar. 

“Silence, devil. You are beaten. The light of God will burn through your lies and you will be cast into the pit and I shall be rid of you.” 

The voice laughed.

“What do you know of God, boy?” Now it spoke in a queerly unaccented voice, unemotional. It was stripped away of artifice and pure. “You, a monkey barely able to consider the truth of the universe. I was there when Gods shaped the heavens and the earth, when he breathed life into the clay. I was there when Lucifer was cast from the firmament. And you think to know the truth of such miracles? The truth of God’s magnificence?”

“I know that you are unholy.”

“You know shit about shit, boy. But I can show you.” 

Of all the things the creature had tempted me with, this caused me to pause; my travels had all been borne from the need to find meaning. I believed, perhaps naively, that there simply must be more to life than the common, brutal drudgery that I had been witness to all my life. But no matter where I went, no matter how deeply into the jungle nor how high into the mountains, all I ever found was the same struggles for survival that I had always seen, just in different customs and clothing.

I was not surprised when I saw that the parchment was blowing down the street and the box was unconcealed in my hands. There were strange sigils carved into the grey wood, symbols that seemed to skew and change when my eyes slid across them. Sigils that hurt my head to look at them. 

“Let me show you the truth, Phàdraig.” 

Like a child caught in a nightmare, I watched as my hand reached up and began to open the box. I was distantly aware of the light from the church, so close at hand and yet impossibly far away. I willed myself to stop, but I could not. And a part of me was glad, because I realized I wanted to know more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. 

I opened the box.

I saw it. The truth. 

I saw. It.

It. I…