Michelle, Gary, Nina, and Shelly went out trying to warn the world online, on TV, on the radio, and in newspapers and magazines everywhere. They wasted no time giving their message maximum circulation.
Naturally, though he didn’t get along with his brother, Gary tried to convince Cam to be prepared for what was surely to come. They were arguing in Cam’s office in the country club.
“Oh, come on, Cam!” Gary said in frustration. “The earthquake at the golf course didn’t convince you, the thunderstorm at the Wellses’ mansion, the sea storm that killed the rich people on that yacht out in the Pacific Ocean, and the death of Lipton in the Texas mine: none of these things is even coming close to making you suspicious of what’s going on?”
“None of it,” Cam said with a smug smirk. “They were just freak accidents, Gary. Stop overthinking what happened. Stop making them into something that they weren’t. Stop making connections where there aren’t any. You and your ridiculous pagan gods. Christ!”
“Cam, I’m begging you. You’re my brother. I don’t want you and your wife to die. Give me an opportunity to get you to a safe place.”
“Gary, I have work to do in this country club. I’m much too busy to be wandering off somewhere to find some ‘giant box.’ We have to repair damages caused by the earthquake. We have customers we have to reassure, so they’ll keep coming back.”
“The earthquake that claimed the lives of at least a dozen members, whom we saw die that day, killed by the gods, who clearly sympathize with neither your business nor your clientele.”
Cam sighed. “Go home, Gary. Pray to your gods if this is so important to you.”
Gary sighed and left the room, saying, “Well, I tried.”
Many of the common people, though, not just Wiccans and other neopagans, but also many who knew of how supernatural each of the four incidents were, took the warnings seriously and would find the four boxes that Michelle, Gary, Shelly, and Nina told them about. Other boxes would be provided for all the other parts of the world where there was a substantial number of people willing to heed the warnings. They would all manage to fit in, despite the mass of the multitudes, for the gods’ power would help them all find room.
Michelle, for example, was much more successful than Gary was in convincing her family and close friends to go with her and find the huge box provided for them. This was so in spite of the fact that none of them shared her pagan beliefs.
“Here it is,” she said to those in her car as they all looked at the box from the base of a grassy hill where it sat on top. Like all the others, it looked like a giant wooden rectangular crate, though it also shone and glistened in a special way that those who looked at it could intuitively feel it was safe…for the gods were giving them that reassuring intuition. “Isn’t that amazing?”
“Yeah,” her mother said as she looked out the window from the passenger seat beside Michelle. “As strange a thing as that is to go inside, I’m getting this even stranger, but reassuring feeling that I’ll be perfectly safe in it. I’m not getting that reassurance from Jesus, though. I have no idea why I’m feeling that way, but I am.”
“I can tell you why, mama,” Michelle said. “It’s because the gods are giving you that feeling. Everyone who sees those things, wherever they appear on the Earth—and that’s around the world, from the reports I’m getting on social media—gets the same reassuring feeling that they’ll be perfectly safe in those boxes, as unlikely as such a feeling would be had the gods not been telling us.”
“I see,” her mom said, with a skeptical, but open-minded attitude. I insist on there being only one God in three persons—though I’ll admit that I’ve been wrong before. Those books Michelle bought me certainly challenged my faith, and they were written by an Episcopalian, of all people, as I am, so I can’t just dismiss the ideas outright. Finally, there’s that dream I had, which Michelle also had, the exact same dream. I’m still not sure: were the speakers gods, or God’s angels?
Nina was talking to Steve that night about the coming danger.
“Look, honey,” he said. “I’m cool with you practicing your…pagan spirituality, whatever it is…but I don’t share your beliefs in it. I respect your views; can you please respect mine?”
“Steve,” Nina said. “This isn’t about agreeing to disagree. Something terrible is about to happen—all over the world, and I don’t want you to perish in it, because you will, if you don’t come with me to the giant box where it is.”
“I don’t get how we’re going to be safe in a…giant box…from the end of the world, as you’re describing it,” he said. “No offence, honey, but this all sounds crazy. I think you need to see a doctor. As wild and as scary as what happened to me and Lipton at the mine, I’m still convinced it was just a freak occurrence. The voice I heard from the hole must have been a hallucination, because of the stress of the moment.”
“It was the voice of Hades!” Nina insisted. “I heard his voice at the mine!”
“I’m sure there must be some kind of scientific explanation for it. You’re making way too big a deal out of it. The stress from all of your concern for the environment is getting to you.”
“And the stress of being a miner is not getting to you?” she said. “You don’t think flying out of that hole was supernatural? What scientific explanation could cover what happened out there? Look, just come with me in the car, and let me show you where the box is. When you see it, you’ll understand.”
“How is ‘seeing it’ going to make me automatically understand, Nina?”
“I can’t explain it to you, but I know that many other people have had the experience of just seeing one of the boxes, and they know, intuitively, that going in them will be good for them. Please, Steve, indulge me. Let’s just go for a ride in the car and see the box. I’ve seen it; I know where it is.”
“Very well,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “If it will make you feel better, I’ll do what you want.”
“Trust me. You won’t regret it.”
They had been driving for about twenty minutes, Steve sneering and sighing the whole time in the passenger seat of their car. Then, far off on top of a hill, Nina was straining her eyes to see a tiny, shining rectangular box.
“Look!” she said, pointing straight ahead. “There it is!”
“What?” he said, squinting his eyes to see. “I don’t see—“
Then, the rectangle got bigger as they neared it, and it shone more clearly.
“What the—?” he asked, sneering in disbelief.
They were now close enough to see it properly. She stopped the car at the foot of the hill. She looked over at him with a smirk.
“Do you believe me now?”
He just stared through the passenger window at the shiny giant box, in a trance.
“Let’s make sure we’re here…when the time comes,” he said in a monotone voice.
“Good,” Nina said with a smile. “Very good, Steve.”
Shelly didn’t even bother trying to convince those she knew wouldn’t believe the warnings. She simply planned to take them on rides in her car as she looked for the box. When it was finally found, they would see it, and instinctively they would know to get in when the time came.
“Come on, everybody,” she said to them as they sat bored in the living room, watching a TV that had nothing interesting on. “What do you all say we get in the car, go for a ride, get some fresh air, and have a picnic?”
“OK,” her husband said. “Where will we go?”
“I’ve already prepared the food and drinks,” she said. “Let’s just get in the car, be spontaneous, and I’m sure we’ll find a good place.”
“Well, alright,” her sister, Jeannine, said. “We’ve nothing better to do here, and the weather’s nice out, without being too hot. Let’s go.”
As they were driving and driving, her at the wheel, she was whispering to the gods to guide her to wherever the box was.
“Shelly?” her husband asked as he looked with a sneer at her moving mouth. “Are you talking to yourself?”
“Oh?” she said, then fumbled in her mind for an explanation. “Oh, I’m just singing the words to a song to myself.”
“I don’t hear a melody,” he said.
“Well, you know what a bad singer I am.”
He chuckled.
Then, she felt a kind of psychic pull in the right direction.
“Oh, I know where to go,” she said, then she took a right turn at an intersection.
“Where’s that?” Jeannine asked.
“You’ll see, soon enough.”
“Where?” her husband asked.
“I want it to be a surprise.”
“Oh, very well, then.”
After another two minutes, they found a hill with a box on it, shining and huge.
“Look up there, everybody, to your right,” she said. “Up at the top of that hill.”
Her husband, sister, and mother all looked out their windows and saw the box.
“Do you all see it?” she asked.
“Yes,” they all said as if in a trance.
Then her husband said, still in that mesmeric state. “I have a feeling…we’ll need to come back here again soon.”
“I have that feeling, too,” Jeannine said.
“Me, three,” her mom said.
“Good,” Shelly said. “Very good.”
She opened her car door and got out.
Her husband got out next. “We’re having our picnic here?”
“Yes,” she said, then shut her door and went to the trunk to get out the picnic basket.
“I like it,” he said as he stared at the box. “I like it a lot.”
“Me, too,” Jeannine said, also staring at the box in a trance.
“Me, three,” their mom said.
I’m so glad I didn’t have to argue with them or convince them, Shelly thought as she took the basket out of the trunk. When it comes to getting people to do things your way, sometimes less is more.
