The Riddle

For weeks, I have been tormented by a singular dream.

A man in a gray suit comes up to me in a darkened room, and sits down across from me. A single light illuminates the plain wooden table between us. There are no exits that I can see.

His knotted brow casts a shadow over his face. Most of his features are obscured, save for his mouth and eyes. What cold eyes they are! I had seen a documentary some years ago where scientists had drilled into the arctic tundra to take samples of the ground. It turned out to be ice, all the way down. Dirty ice, packed with the disease and coagulation of centuries. His eyes are the color of that ice.

The man begins to speak.

“I have with me two briefcases. One of these,” he says, pulling out a large rectangular case, “contains wealth. Wealth beyond your imagining, wealth beyond what any human being could amass and use in a lifetime. Limitless, endless, powerful.

“The other one,” he says, pulling out a second identical case, “contains disease. Disease that will kill every living being on earth. It will kill your family. It will kill your friends. They will die, horribly, painfully, and their last breaths will be used to curse your name for all of eternity. And of course, it will kill you, but it will kill you last. You will watch everyone on earth fade into nothingness and, in your last hours, you will know that it is because you opened the case. You will know it is your fault.”

I look down at the two cases. They are covered in fresh black leather without a single scuff mark. The outsides are sewn with light brown fabric of a nature I can not determine. The corners are anointed with small cast-iron studs, presumably to prevent the cases from being damaged if dropped. The two cases are always the same.

He pushes the cases towards me and he smiles, without the light of human kindness in his eyes. I say nothing, and begin examining the cases more closely. I pick up both of them, one at a time.

The one on my left feels heavy. I can feel something inside of it rolling around and, from the sound of it hitting the side of the case, it is hard. Glass, maybe, or perhaps a stone of some kind.

The one on my right is much lighter than the first. If there isn’t anything inside of it, I can’t feel it rattling around. In fact, as far as I can tell, it is empty. Sometimes, some nights, in a moment of scatterbrained curiosity, I nearly open it just to see if it was empty or not, but I always think better of it at the last moment.

I put my hand over the clasp of the first box. My choice being made, I slowly begin to remove the safety catch. I probably would have opened it, too, but every time I see the man’s smile widen and his eyes darken with excitement and, dare I say, hunger. I pull my hand away, and he appears almost disappointed… but only for a moment. Then his poker face returns, and he sits, waiting for me to make my choice. Calmly, he sits, his icy features turned towards me with a casual intensity that belies a deeply burning fire.

I try to return his gaze, but always find myself lacking.

After a minute’s thought, I open the second, lighter case. I open it slowly, cautiously, carefully. Time moves at a glacier’s pace. The light above the table casts a shadow that fails to illuminate the contents of the case until the last moment, and when I look inside I see, to my surprise, a single dollar.

“There are more where those came from. Hundreds more. Thousands. Millions. As many as you want. They are yours.”

I sigh, and sit back in my chair. My choice, it seemed, is the correct one. I chose the proper briefcase, the one that would not doom me and everyone else I knew into utter ruin.

And yet, I looked at the man across the table, and I find myself unable to relax, or feel any relief. His eyes, predatory, tear into me with such ferocity as I would never have imagined; they are two icy knives in my throat, and I find myself unable to speak. I gasp, and gurgle, trying to vocalize something, anything, but my vowels find no purchase.

Without a word to me, the man pops open the safety catch on the first case. I try to scream, to stop him, but my limbs felt weighed down, as though they are tied to the ground. I writhe and groan, uselessly. He flips the case open. Inside is, as I had in part correctly surmised, a small glass vial. He picks it up, and holds it up in the light. The grin remains on his face despite the desperate depths of malice in his eyes.

This isn’t right, I think. I won! I made the right choice!

I struggle against my invisible bonds desperately, trying to shake off the leaden weights that seem to cover every inch of my body. My head lolls from side to side, uselessly, and feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. I manage a gutteral grunt, into which I put the brunt of my raw emotion, my terror, my anger, and my surprise.

He must understand, somehow, because his look changes from anger to a cruel, piteous stare. He tutts, and chuckles softly.

“What made you think,” he says, “that you ever had even the tiniest amount of control?”

And there it is. The riddle. The dark and terrible question that has haunted me for weeks. Every night, he throws the vial to the ground, and every time, just as it crashes to the ground and shatters into a million pieces, I awaken, covered in sweat, covered in sweat, and convulsing. My skin feels icy cold. Sometimes I vomit. Sometimes I just lie in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the light of morning to relieve my fear.

It was bad enough. Really, it was bad enough before yesterday. I was, until yesterday, considering seeing a therapist, or a psychiatrist. Even a hypnotist. Anything to stop the nightmares.

Then, last evening, I received a call from my father, asking me to come at once to his house out of town. I heard an urgency in his voice I had not heard before. I put on my coat, and ran out to my car in the pouring rain, driving half an hour to reach our old home in the woods.

As I pulled in, I could see there was another car in our driveway, one that I did not recognize. The lights in the house are off but, as the rain pours down lightning splits the sky and I can see two figures sitting at the kitchen table. The crack of the lightning is deafening, almost directly overhead.

I rush inside and, to my horror, I see my father sitting at the table with another man. A man whose face I have seen dozens of times in recent memory. A man with startling, piercing gray eyes that haunt me every time I close my own.

He beckoned me to the table. My father said nothing, so I pulled up a chair with a shaky hand, and felt my forehead clot with a thin layer of cold sweat. The lights are so dim, I can barely make out what’s in front of me but, somehow, I can see his eyes through the darkness. I hear the creak and groan of the old house, and for a moment it almost sounds as though there is a man upstairs.

But I know there is not. The man, who I fear, is sitting right in front of me, his cold eyes washing over my soul as though I had just jumped into an icy mountain spring.

The man began to speak.

He said he is an old friend of my father’s.

He said he knows me, very well.

He said he wanted to show me something, and in three days’ time, he will arrive at my own home.

He will bring a surprise for me, he said. Something he thinks I will enjoy.

And then, without another word, he dismisses me with a wave of his hand.

My father said nothing during this entire exchange. He sat with a glossy look in his eyes, as though he was seeing without understanding. He was so still that, even now, I am not sure he was breathing. I wanted to shout out, to scream, to yell that I would not, would never meet this man. But I don’t. I get up, and I leave.

I drive home in the rain. I must have driven home, anyway, because soon I was in my bed, staring at the ceiling once again. Last night, sleep did not reach me. Tonight looks little better.

I have thought of leaving town, of running away, but somehow I know it will be of little use. I spent hours today pondering my predicament. I know that no matter where I run to, I will never be able to escape this man. He has already found me, months ago, when he invaded my head in the dead of night. I can’t run from someone that’s already here, after all.

As I write this, I am sitting in an armchair of my flat, but I think I will not be here for long. I know a way to end this, a way to prevent what happens next. There is only one answer. I will miss all of you terribly.

. . .

“… And that’s where it ends, sir” declared officer Rogers. She held the notebook In a single gloved hand, her face scrunched up as she scrutinized the nearly illegible writing.

“Jesus. What a nut.” I say with a sigh. “Toss it in the box, with the other shit.”

I was on cleanup detail, scouring the guy’s apartment for clues. Apparently, he had kept mostly to himself and, by all accounts from friends and family, had never had a tight grasp on reality. Of course, people always say stuff like that when they see their neighbor spread all over the walls and carpet with a gun barrel in what used to be, presumably, his face.

There is a knock at the door and, a man in a long coat walks into the room.

“Dansworth, correct?” he inquires, looking at me.

“Yeah, that’s me. You the guy from the city they were talking about sending over?”

He says nothing, but takes the box.

“Alright, pal, have fun sorting through that stuff,” I say. “The guy seemed like a real nutcase, probably not too much useful in there.”

The man in the coat pauses, then shrugs.

“Maybe.” he says. He stares at me, with cold, emotionless eyes, and then walks out the door with the box. I shiver, though the room is warm and humid.

Hours later, I find out there was a mix-up at the station, and some documents have gone missing. Gone, along with them, was the box that contained the nutjob’s writing. I’m not worried, though. This stuff happens all the time when we handle a lot of cases at once. It almost always gets sorted out within a day. No big deal.

And yet, that night, I have trouble sleeping.