Every night I sleepwalk and try to open a sealed trunk in my apartment. I’m terrified of what will happen when I succeed.

First I have to tell you about the trunk.

It belonged to a middle-aged nobody—let’s call them Liu—who had an enormous lake house in the woods. It was Brayden who told us about the house. Said it was full of antique Chinese porcelain and vases and jade and all sorts of valuables. Said that the owner was a recluse who didn’t do anything but collect precious objects and hoard them, that the house was practically a museum.

But the heist was all Jess’s idea. Not mine.

None of it was mine.

Not that it’s an excuse for what happened. I’m just saying, I didn’t intend for any of this. Nobody did.

It’s just that the opportunity was there. Because all those old antique vases—that shit was valuable. Brayden ran an auction biz, that’s how he met Liu, and how he knew that Liu was harmless. A bald-headed hermit of indeterminate gender, Liu was shy and short and nearsighted, and Brayden said, “They’re like if Piglet from Winnie the Pooh was human and hoarded antiques.”

More importantly, Liu distrusted technology and feared government surveillance, and had no cameras. Only a simple alarm system.

“Here’s what we do. We just knock on the door, acting friendly, until the antiques collector disarms the alarm to open it up for us. Easy,” claimed Jess. She was the brassy one, and since Liu might recognize Brayden, she agreed to be the knocker. Not only was our victim near-sighted, but Jess planned to disguise her appearance with makeup and a wig. After the door was open, I’d lunge and tackle Liu. Then we’d bind Liu’s hands with zipties and lock them in a closet while we looted the house.

And at first, everything went off without a hitch.

It was all too easy. Just like Brayden said, Liu answered the door, and surrendered to us like a petrified hare, not even objecting, just shivering until we put the bag over their bald head. The only problem was the closet. The closets were all full—of winter supplies, or cleaning items, or pantry stocks.

Then I spotted the trunk.

A big, lacquered antique trunk with designs all across the top and sides.

I pointed it out to Jess and she got a big grin and we pushed Liu into the trunk and closed and locked it.

Then Brayden came in and silently pointed us to the most valuable items and we packed them all up.

There was a Qing dynasty vase worth $5000. Ming dynasty jades worth tens of thousands. And so much more.

After we left, Brayden mentioned one of us should call the cops and tip them off so that Liu wouldn’t be left in the trunk. Jess said it shouldn’t be one of us. If it got traced back to us, we’d be fucked. And eventually Jess convinced me to talk to my girlfriend-at-the-time, Monique. I told her I’d witnessed a possible break-in and that I didn’t want to call it in myself because I already looked shady, peeking in through the windows. Monique probably suspected something was up—she was reluctant to make the call, but after my wheedling and promising to buy her something nice if she did, she finally agreed. Then we all went out for drinks and celebrated our haul. And since Brayden was the one who was gonna sell the stuff and get our share to us, he gave me and Jess an advance.

It all went off without a hitch.

Until a little over a week later, when Brayden called.

His voice was strained on the phone. “Yo,” he said, “you called in that tip, right?”

“What? Yeah.”

A long pause. And then, “I sent my delivery guy to the house. He said no one was home. Liu’s not answering the phone, either.”

“Delivery?” I echoed, confused.

“Yo I told you about this last week! I know Liu from auction. They bought an item, and I told them I’d make a delivery. I sent my guy to do it. I was also gonna try and get a feel for… for Liu’s reaction to everything, you know? See if they have any suspicions.”

“OK.”

“You sure you called in that tip?”

“Yes! I—I mean, Monique, she said she—”

“Get here NOW.”

Fuck.

On my way to Brayden’s office, I spoke to Monique. She was at work, and I asked if she’d called in that tip last week like she promised and she said, “Oh, shoot, babe.”

My stomach dropped. “What do you mean, ‘shoot’?”

“I didn’t even want to make the call, OK? You pressured me into it! I didn’t want to do it, and I was getting worked up about it because it felt weird, and then… I forgot. All right? What’s the big deal?”

“WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL? THE BIG DEAL IS—” I bit off my words, ‘cause anything else I said could incriminate me. Monique didn’t know any details, just my story about seeing something shady. Yeah it was weak, but she’d seemed to buy it at the time.

All she had to do was call the fuckin’ cops, you know?

None of this would’ve happened if she’d just called the cops like she was fucking supposed to.

So there we were, the three of us, Jess and Brayden and I, standing in Brayden’s office screaming accusations at each other. Then Brayden said we had to go back to the house and check on everything. Jess was firmly against the idea. Brayden said fine he and I would go since he had a delivery to make anyway. I tried to object but he told me, “No, you fucked this up, you’re coming with me.”

So we made the drive up to the lake house. And on our way there, winding through the trees, it struck me how isolated the place was. How deep into the woods and nature and all that crap. And how if you were stuck in a closet or inside a trunk surrounded by jade and porcelain, there would be no neighbors to hear you scream.

Still, somehow the reality hadn’t settled in yet. I clung to the vague notion everything would turn out all right. That we’d break in and open the trunk and that little bald collector would be petrified and traumatized but wouldn’t recognize me. That somehow, they wouldn’t know the hands of the person who pushed them into the trunk.

What kind of idiot am I, that I was worried about being recognized?

Then we were at the house.

That big, beautiful house with the deck overlooking the lake and the tall glass windows. And everything seemed calm. But the front entrance in the shade of the trees was ominous, somehow. And the silence hung too heavy. And Brayden and I got out and approached the door, and both of us just stood there for a moment. When we tried the knob, it was locked. We’d closed it behind us when we left a week ago. No, more than that. It’d been nine days.

Brayden told me to look for another way in.

I didn’t like being bossed around, but apparently that’s how it was since he and Jess both blamed me. So I went around the side of the big house, trying the windows, and to my surprise the window to the living room slid easily upwards. I froze as I peered through the open window into the dim interior, which looked exactly as we’d left it.

And there, still in its place in the corner sandwiched between the sofa and an ornate hutch, was the trunk. Only it appeared to have shifted slightly. It was ever so slightly askew compared to the other items in the room. Compared to the furniture that was almost obsessively positioned, every item in perfect place. The trunk was like a cock-eyed picture frame. Like something inside had been banging around, knocking it out of position.

It was still locked shut.

I pulled my head out of the window and looked back at Brayden. His face looked exactly how mine felt—tight, heavy with dread.

We’d both noticed the smell.

A godawful stink emanating from inside.

***

What’s important is that you understand—it wasn’t supposed to go that way. Nothing went like how it was supposed to. It was all just a mistake. A stupid fucking mistake. But the real problem—the reason I’m writing this post now—is because of what came next. I don’t know what the fuck to do. I can’t ask anyone for help. Can’t go to the police. And here’s the real fucking problem:

The trunk is in my home.

I don’t know how it got here.

All I know is I woke up one morning and it was in my living room.

Wait. Let me back up.

Before that, we had all these antiques, right? We never saw a dime from them. After Brayden and I left the lake house, we didn’t speak to a soul. We didn’t even talk to each other. It was like we just wanted to forget. To act like none of this had happened and like none of us knew each other. We stopped calling each other or hanging around. All of us felt guilty, I guess, and the antiques are still just sitting in one of Brayden’s auction storage facilities somewhere.

Then one evening Jess rang. Said the trunk was in her living room.

I honestly thought she was fucking with me, and I wanted to forget all this trunk bullshit, and I hung up on her.

When I got the news she OD’d, it was a shock, but honestly she’d always been wild. Her death was really fuckin’ sad but not totally surprising when I thought about it.

Then Brayden called me. On the phone, he was freaking out. Asked if I knew how she died. Yeah, I said, I saw on her socials friends posting about how she’d OD’d. He said not just that, her body had been found inside a trunk. That she’d apparently tucked herself inside before overdosing. I asked if he was fucking with me—

“It’s in my living room,” he burst, sounding breathless on the phone. “The trunk.”

I said, “That’s not fucking funny.”

“I’m not fucking joking. It’s here. I’m looking right at it right now, it’s here.”

I told him to quit making shit up, but when he asked me to come over, I did. And we just stood there and looked at it.

It was the exact same fucking trunk. Same ornate designs. Same scuff marks along the surface and the corners. Same crack in one of the mother-of-pearl flowers on the lacquered surface. It was the trunk. I asked him how it got there, and he told me there was nothing on the ring cam. But when he woke up and came into his room this morning it was here. I asked if he’d opened it and he gave me a long look.

Dread settled deep in my gut.

Then, “Fuck it,” I said, and opened the lid.

The groan of the hinges, the whoosh of air as it creaked open—it was like a last gasp of someone or something suffocating. As if the damned thing took a breath. But when I looked into the yawning interior—there was nothing. Nobody. And no body either.

Just a faint stain and a musty, unpleasant odor.

We both stood over it for a long time before Brayden’s nostrils flared and he asked me, “Did you do this?”

I told him no way.

We argued. He said if he went down I was going down too. I told him it wasn’t me. He asked who else knew? Who else coulda done it? Did I think a fuckin’ ghost did it?

I told him maybe Jess set this whole thing up before she died. If she really had crawled into the trunk before OD’ing, maybe she did it as a statement, I said, out of guilt. And maybe arranged to have the trunk brought here after her death to punish us. I’m not sure if he believed me, but I’m telling you, like I told him, it was not me. He told me he was gonna send the trunk to my house and I said he’d better fucking not and that if he did, I’d burn it, and he said “That’s actually a good idea. Help me.”

I didn’t like how he was acting the boss of me but I didn’t like that trunk either, so I helped him. We carved it up with an axe, smashed it all apart and burned it in the firepit out back. It smelled like roasting flesh. It was absolutely foul, lemme tell you. The way the lacquer sizzled and oozed as it shriveled. It looked like we were burning a corpse, and it smelled like it, too.

When it was done, I went home.

But a few days later, I got a call from one of Brayden’s coworkers asking if I’d seen him. He hadn’t been in to work. I panicked and called the cops for a wellness check. I babbled a little on the phone to them, I think. I was just freaked out. Anyway, the cops did a check on him and found him.

In the trunk.

He was burned to a crisp.

But there were no burn marks on the trunk at all.

***

So you see my dilemma?

The trunk. The fucking trunk showed up in my apartment.

First thing I did was lock it in my basement storage. But then I thought, What if I get stuck inside it? Who’ll hear me scream? So then I put it back in the middle of the living room and I set cameras on it, watching it. And I put a magnetized alarm on the lid that triggers when it opens.

The first night I woke up around 1am to the sound of the alarm. I was standing over the trunk, which I had just opened, and it was yawning as if ready to swallow me. I backed up, heart galloping, and my phone rang and I had to tell the alarm company that everything was fine, it was me, I’d tripped it by accident.

Except it wasn’t by accident. Apparently I’d sleepwalked my way over to the trunk and tried to climb in.

I didn’t sleep a wink the rest of the night.

Since then I’ve put a padlock on my bedroom door with a numbered combination. I’ve handcuffed myself to the bed and put the key in a bucket of ice. I’ve set an alarm on my bedroom door to wake me if I leave.

This has worked pretty well so far. Usually, I wake up the moment my arm does the polar plunge for the key. A few times I’ve woken fumbling at the padlock. And once, when I fell into a really deep sleep after an exhausting day, I woke up only after the sirens exploded in my ears from my opening the door.

But then yesterday, it almost caught me. I woke up with the yawning ornamental trunk about to swallow me. It was only the pounding on the door that woke me. A neighbor was banging and screaming. I’d sleep-walked right through the alarm, and to be honest didn’t even hear the sirens at first until the neighbor asked me if I was fucking deaf, and I realized he was shouting at me and the reason was so I could hear him over the shrill wail. I turned the sirens off, answered the call from the security company, and then I went to the hardware store.

I bought steel bars and welded them around the trunk in a cage so that the lid can’t be opened more than a couple inches.

But I’m worried it won’t be enough.

The trunk has started to smell. I mean really, really smell. And sometimes it moves. It jerks and thumps inside its steel cage, like there’s something inside it. Or someone. Someone trapped.

I’m afraid to get rid of it. I’m certain if I dump it, it’ll just return. I already know what happens if I burn it. Sometimes I have dreams in which I’m the one inside it, thumping, screaming, begging to be let out, but nobody is around to hear me. And one of these days, I’m afraid I won’t wake up from that dream.

Please, tell me—what the fuck do I do?