The Box Of Nails

Published on October 20th, 2019 on r/NoSleep

God, I miss being young.

When you're a little kid, the world can be so sweet. The adults handle the hard shit and if you're lucky, you never have to question your heroes. They sit there in your stories, in your life, and in your mind as these inspirations that keep you smiling. For some kids, it's a superhero. For others, it's some pop culture celebrity. For some like me, it's our parents.

In my case, my hero was my dad, and today I got to see that image of the heroic and kind man crack and be replaced by something... else. Something I'm not sure I'm really ready to admit, but something I have to. Could go to a therapist, but posting here is way cheaper.

I grew up as an only child raised by an only parent. My mom had died soon after I was born due to a terrible car accident. My life was pretty nice and normal despite that, for the most part. I wasn't a particularly troublesome kid, I worked hard in school, and besides maybe being a bit lonely at home, I didn't really have problems making friends or feeling socially fulfilled. However, the person I was the closest to throughout my life was my dear old Dad.

We lived in a really lonely and rural area in Pennsylvania. If you've never been to Pennsylvania, a lot of it is filled with these dense woodlands and tall mountains that lead to some areas being kinda secluded. Didn't have really any neighbors to speak of, just eachother. So, I spent most of my time as a little kid hanging out with my dad when he was home. I think for most of that time he worked as an office clerk or something. He hated it, though. He was either bored out of his mind during work or he was working with people he didn't get along too well with. Besides that, he hated office work; he preferred to work with his hands. However, he couldn't find anything that paid better than that job, so the more hands-on work he had fun with had to become a hobby.

So, when he came home from work and wasn't too exhausted, him and I would head into his workshop in the garage. There I'd get to watch him build things like shelves, birdhouses, desks, you name it. I even got to help him a little! It was almost like he was a surgeon and I was his assistant. We'd put on dust masks to prevent wood shavings getting in our mouths, and he'd talk like a doctor saying "Drill! Glue! Hammer! Screws!", stuff like that. It was always a ton of fun.

I really can’t thank my dad enough for spending as much time as he could with me. I sometimes would see that sad look in his eyes when he’d see my mother through me. He did his best to keep himself together and composed despite that, though I cannot imagine what kind of pain he was holding in the whole time. Seeing that sadness in his eyes wasn’t exactly uncommon, but one particular memory of it sticks out in my memory.

Have you ever had something in your house that just kinda sits there like a permanent fixture for whatever reason? Like some kind of decoration, object, mark on the wall, or some quirky thing like that that just stays around for so long you forget it even exists? Well, there was something like that in the garage.

One day, when we were working together on a little box shelter for the stray cats in the area (something I begged my dad to make), things were going normal. He had cut the wood panels into the right shapes, and now just had to put them together and paint it. He made a simple request of me, his little assistant: get some nails.

So, I looked around to find some nails in his workshop. I looked around all over the garage. Found plenty of screws and little fixtures, but somehow couldn't find nails this day. I'd assumed maybe we ran out, but that's when I noticed the box sitting on the highest shelf on the wall. A yellow box that read "Dewalt" on the side and said it contained 2500 nails right below the name.

"Can I get the ladder, dad?" I asked.

"Huh? What for?" Dad asked.

"I can't find any nails around here but I see a box of them over there, " I pointed to the shelf with the box.

"...Oh, no that box is empty, “ he said with a sad look in his eyes, “I grabbed the last one out of there the other day and forgot to throw it away. We must be out. Can you get me some screws, then?"

I couldn’t see why that made his eyes like that at the time. Of course, why would I? It was just an empty box of nails. And yet, somehow it must have reminded him of mother. Maybe she was short? Maybe he had to help her get things like that? I know it was my fault, but I couldn’t help but feel like it was. That empty box of nails ended up staying on the shelf for as long as I can remember.

The years went on and I got older. My High School years were marked by two things: Firstly, an obsession with branching out from home (mostly to get laid, admittedly), and the weird headlines that hit the papers during that time. A series of terrible killings that happened a few towns over from mine.

Some bodies had been turning up in the forests after a big rainstorm eroded a lot of dirt. Five bodies with varying levels of decomposition were found over the course of three months. All of them were of women in their late 20s, horribly mutilated in the same way, the most notable part being that they all had puncture wounds all over their bodies, and their hands and feet were mutilated or just straight up amputated. There was clearly a pattern, clearly a killer at large. They were called, unofficially, the Pin Cushion Murders due to the multiple puncture wounds that covered the women's bodies.

This was always a background event for me, though. It was happening far enough away that it was more of a scary, far away trouble than a real terror among me and the people I knew in High School. We did what normally happens when people hear about terrible shit happening in the world: we said "that's fucked up" and moved on.

The body count associated with the killings grew to about 10 women, but the case went unsolved for the next 12 years without a total confirmed kill count or a conviction. While that case didn’t progress much in those twelve years, my life certainly did.. I moved to the city, got a job working in graphic design, made decent money. I stopped seeing my dad regularly in person because of it and we had to make do with a weekly phone call to keep in touch, at least until a month ago when I got one of the most upsetting phone calls of my life.

My dad had developed cancer, and he needed me to help take care of him. Treatments had stopped working and he finally couldn't take care of himself anymore. He had hidden it from me for a long time because he didn't want to disrupt my life. I was furious at him, but at the same time more depressed than I thought I could possibly be.

So, I dropped everything and moved back into our old house with him. He didn't have much longer, but I wanted to spend as much time as possible with him before he went. It was fucking hell seeing him in person again after all that time to find him be almost skin and bones with almost no hair. As terrible as it is to say, I really wanted to turn right back around and run away, I was so scared for him. I almost couldn't deal with it, but I had to. Even if that last month would be spent watching the father I loved wither and die slowly before my eyes, I knew I had to.

Well, flash forward to today. The man is in the hospital, but I'm not with him. I'm at the old house, sitting in front of a laptop and bouncing my leg while trying to hold in tears and screams. Why? I'll tell you.

I'd decided a few days ago that I'd make my dad something while I had the time. Something to surprise him, something to take us back to all those wonderful times in the workshop. I was a little rusty on all that was involved in woodworking, but I knew he probably still had all the tools and that I'd be able to find whatever else I needed online. So, I found some instructions on making a simple birdhouse and I got to work.

I followed the steps I remember watching my dad take while liberally consulting the online guide. I got the sheets of wood, planned out the panels I needed, cut them out, sanded them, and got to the stage where I had to fasten them together. And, wouldn't you know it, I needed some nails for it. And wouldn't you fucking know it, I remembered that box of empty nails sitting on the top of the shelf. I wish I hadn't.

I remembered that box, and looked up to where I remembered it being. I couldn't believe it was still sitting there. Dad never got around to throwing it out, it seemed. It had blended in and become a background fixture of the house. I hadn't noticed it again until now, but this time I was tall enough to actually reach it without a ladder. So, I reached for it. Imagine my surprise when I found it had weight to it and that it rattled. The fucking thing rattled. You might reasonably think that this just was a new box of nails, but no. The thing was old as shit and smelled musty and wrong. This thing shouldn't have had anything in it, if my dad was telling the truth.

Turns out, my dad's a fucking liar. My dad's been someone else this whole time. I know that because I opened it.

And there, in that old, unassuming little box, were at least 100 old and bloody human nails.

***

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