Within the forlorn and empty walls of your house was an infinite number of boxes upon boxes, all neatly packed, taped, and labelled in large block letters with their contents. Strewn across the rooms and stacked in dangerous piles, threatening to topple over, they were the only thing furnishing the now bare floors. Seventeen years of your life jammed into fifty odd cartons. You wiped your hands on your plaster-coated overalls, making your way through the cardboard crowd, checking for any stray items that may have evaded your sight. All that met your eyes was a thick coating of dust. Climbing over the debris, you heaved a sigh, satisfied with your hours of effort.
Something glittered.
You caught your reflection for a split second in a clear surface. How curious. Cardboard boxes weren’t shiny, as far as you knew. As you stepped through the labyrinth to where you thought you had seen the glimmer, you found one single open box that you had somehow missed on your patrol.
Strange. You were pretty sure that wasn’t there before.
And even stranger still, the box only contained one thing…
A mountain of glass spheres.
You definitely did not remember owning these, and had not come across them in the seventeen years you had lived in this house. You couldn’t remember packing them either. They didn’t seem to be of any use other than perhaps ornamental, given that they were just spheres of glass.
You bent to pick it up, but hesitated slightly. Something about them made you want to resist. Pushing the feeling aside, you clasped one of the circles in your palms and examined it, perplexed. You were now absolutely certain that these were not your belongings, until you turned the ball to one side and saw traces of something etched in its side. Words? No, a name. Scratched and faded, but still there. Now you really wished you wore your glasses more often. It was barely legible, but you made out what it said: Sophia. A common name, nothing unusual. One shared by your sister, in fact. But what did it mean? Maybe it’s her’s, you thought. I should go and ask her. She’s upstairs, isn’t she?
As you turned, your heel caught on one of the boxes beside you, and your eyes widened, mouth opened in realisation. You hit the ground flat on your face, screaming silently, hearing the sphere shatter into a hundred sparkling shards, one of them embedded in your palm, crimson teardrops seeping out slowly. And then:
A thud.
From upstairs. What was that? Ears pricked, you winced, getting to your feet. Sophia’s upstairs. I should go check on her.
Something held you back, like a warning. There was something you were scared of, something you didn’t want to see. You sneaked a peek at the open carton again, its contents winking at you mockingly, and then your bleeding hand. You bent and picked up another two spheres, searching them for carvings. Surely enough, two more names were inscribed, but this time, they were of your neighbours, a couple. You could see them from the kitchen window, sipping something from their mugs and having an animated conversation. Dread crept up your spine to the nape of your neck, where cold beads of sweat drenched you in anticipation. Something was wrong. You had a gut feeling of what would happen if the ball cracked, but there was no way it was possible. It didn’t make sense.
But there was only one way to know.
You squeezed your eyes shut and held your breath. It took a few seconds to work up the courage, but you counted to three.
One.
Two.
Three.
The sound of splintering glass pierced the air, but this time it was expected, so you merely flinched. You waited, and sure enough, two soft thuds sounded moments after. Breathing you recognised as your own accompanied a racing heartbeat that seemed to echo throughout the empty house. You couldn’t bring yourself to open your eyes. When you finally did, your neighbours no longer stood in their garden. You couldn’t see them, but you had a fair idea of what had happened.
The panic climbed its way from your heart, to your lungs, to your hands, and to the rest of your body, the realisation still refusing to settle in your mind. All of the logic, the science, and the sense in the world made this impossible, yet, there was a clear correlation between each ball and the person whose name it held.
You reached into the box one more time. All the way to the bottom, and you pulled out a sphere. It held a name, just like the rest.
This time, it was your own.
Your own name. Your own existence, in your hands.
The fear was too much. It slipped from your trembling hand, fracturing, the fragments reflecting your face, paralysed with an expression of pure terror, and you felt the cold embrace envelop you before you were snatched away in a blanket of darkness.
Everything went black.
