“One need not be a chamber to be haunted;

One need not be a house;

The brain has corridors surpassing

Material place. “

--Emily Dickinson


My alarm clock blared as usual. The sunlight shimmered through the window and danced over the bookshelf, welcoming, happy but also slightly irritating. I groaned and rolled out of bed, wincing as my feet dipped onto the icy wooden floor. My coffee machine hummed, and I snachted up the cup. The comforting taste of coffee and the buzz of the city outside helped erase the sleep from my eyes. It was a normal day, under normal circumstances, and I was going to work as usual. I buttoned my blouse and swiped a brush through my hair, readying myself for the hustle of New York City life. I climbed the steps of my loft apartment, and snatched a taxi.

My life had become a blur; consisting purely of crowded coffee shops, distant faces, taxi’s, and late nights at the publishing company. It was successful but insignificant, busy but boring. All my problems were work related, and my social life was virtually non-existent. I was unsatisfied. My whole life had been about success. I had known ever since I was born in small town Ohio, I knew New York was my city. It was my home, and I had just been born in the wrong place. My obsession with literature started early too. I always knew what I wanted; and I knew how to get it. I had always lived and prepared for the future. It was like my life in Ohio never existed, and I was there only to end up here. But now I was successful, I was victorious. I had everything I wanted, achieved every goal I had set. My salary and apartment were large, but they were empty. So what was the point in basking in the lights of the city, of never having to worry about my making ends meet, of going to parties and extravagant restaurants, if I was alone?

***

The wind was howling, whipping, and whining as I left my apartment on this particular Saturday afternoon. I was on a mission. Decorating my apartment had become a recent hobby of mine, a way of filling the seemingly small abundance of empty time on my hands. I had stumbled upon a local flea market, as it had become a recent favorite of mine. It was a montage of old and new, of color, glamour and rust. I felt like a treasure hunter; there was something here that I knew I had to have. It was all a matter of finding it.

On this certain day, I had found a strange jar, gold speckled and wrapped in thin, red painted designs. The red lines swirled and swiveled together and apart, growing up the jar, where on the lid they formed the heads of snakes. In the middle of the lid was a sort of asian symbol, and I planned to research it later. It was mesmerizing. I immediately knew I needed the jar. It pulled in the colors of my bookshelf, drawing in the red brick on the side of the room.

The jar occupied the shelf for years, collecting dust, the golden paint shimmering with the sun skipped over it. It was a Friday night, and I had friends over. They were meaningless friends, the kind with whom the banter went in circles, where we talked about anything and everything meaningless. The conversation never ceased, skipping from the latest drama at the office, to next week's party and next month's book release dinner.

Not all of my friends were completely devoid of depth, however, Alyx, a tall blonde with with glittery green eyes, who happened to be much too intelligent for her own good, swiped the jar off the shelf, raising her eyebrows.

“Flea market?” she guessed.

I nodded. “Where else?”

She laughed, a sort of unarmed dry laugh, twisting the jar in her hands. “This symbol on the lid, it’s Japanese for, ‘brutal death’. And the serpents, although their painted blood red, symbolize evil and the ‘messengers of satan’. This jar is actually pretty fascinating.”

I scuffed. “It’s just a jar. I just found it at a flea market, and figured it would go well with the room.”

Alyx shrugged, eyebrows still raised. She turned, walking back towards the bookshelf. And then, and quite fatefully so, the jar spiralled from her hands and plummeted towards the floor. Unsurprisingly, the thin glass jar shattered into a billion slivers, but startlingly, the contents of the jar were revealed. Ashes splayed all over the floor, and in the broken bits of glass and ash, was a small silver plaque. It read, Joshua Perkins, 9 years old,Valui ad satanam invocandum. Having taken Latin for years, I was petrified. The words stammered through my mind, translating to “I succeed in summoning satan.” This was not a jar, it was an urn. The urn of a nine year old boy.

My fingers stumbled over my phone, and the jar was turned over the police. The boy was exactly who the plaque claimed he was, and the remains were returned to the family. Joshua Perkins had been abducted two years ago, disappearing from his bus stop. He was gone, and so was closure. The case only lead to one dead end after another, every clue invalidated before it could even take off. The case was eventually shoved away in a box and forgotten about, shriveled under a pile dead ends and unanswerable questions. It drowned in a pile of cases of the like, lurking in a box entitled, “Cold cases.”

A few days of investigation, life resumed its usual pace. Work was work, and I immersed myself in it even more than I had before. I even began dating, as really a sort of desperate attempt to drown out the loneliness. The jar and it’s blood-curdling contents were almost forgotten about, almost, but not quite. It encompassed itself in the back of my mind, blurry, but ever-present. For anger had the same luster, for fear was persistent, taking me hostage in the later hours of the night. Consuming me when I least expected it.

My sense of security was shattered, but so was my sense of self. The remains of a nine year old boy had sat on my bookshelf for over two years, and I had been so obvious as to never even open the jar once. If I had been keen enough to look at the the inside of the jar before I had purchased it, maybe the monster could have been captured. If I had just looked once, I could have made a difference. It would have been a step towards justice and a step away from ignorance. The “what-ifs” and “why-nots” buzzed in my head, angry with myself for having been in the midsts of a monster, yet having done nothing.