Chương 1: Chapter One: The Prize is Inside

Fifteen years later, and Hollis Hood still found himself wary of dark corners. He stood on the loading dock of a depot in downtown Portland and stared deeply into the building. It was lit with conical lights, the kind Hollis associated with interrogation rooms. Each one brightened the area under it well, but the light didn't spread around the room, thus all the shadowy corners.

Large shelving units stacked with wooden crates dominated the area he could see, and the sounds of forklifts could be heard vrooming in the distance, but he saw no people. He was getting impatient, but he couldn't leave until he had what he came for. It was always this way. He was left waiting, wondering if anyone actually worked at the depot.

If this were any other transaction, Pine & Ledger Estate Liquidations would have lost his business years ago, but it just so happened that they were the only place he could get what he needed.

"You the cereal guy?" a voice called from one of the many dark corners of the depot. Hollis put on a smile.

"That's me," he said. Of all the masks he wore day to day, "cereal guy" had to be the most embarrassing.

"I been waiting all week to meet you," a husky man with long hair and a cherub's red face said as he stepped out into the light with one hand outstretched. His other hand held a clipboard. Hollis shook his hand and laughed like the man had told a joke. That was what cereal guy would do: have a sense of humor about himself.

"Hollis Hood," he said. He spied the man's name tag.

"That would make you Lonnie?"

"It sure would." The large man turned and waved for Hollis to follow him.

"Your lot's set aside over here. Gotta say, it's got me scratching my head."

"My lots always have that effect. Where's Michael?" Hollis asked. The elderly man who usually met him at the loading dock was nowhere to be seen.

"Retired, fired, promoted, couldn't say. Off the schedule. That's all I know. Right this way." Michael had stopped asking questions years ago. Now, Hollis was going to need to break in a whole new guy. Lonnie took him back through the depot, past the high shelves and the forklifts, toward a part of the building with several rows of bays labeled by letter and number. The bays contained objects from estate sales collected together on pallets and wrapped in plastic for safekeeping.

Lamps, books, furniture, and all other kinds of collectibles sat waiting for their new owner to pick them up. The further they walked into the building, the more Hollis' eyes adjusted to the light, and the shadows faded. His deep-seated distrust of the dark quieted.

"Here you are," Lonnie said.

"Bay H26. The cereal aisle." Hollis chuckled politely and looked at his lot. A hundred assorted cereal boxes sat on a pallet, wrapped and ready to go. There were Frosted Flakes, Cheerios, Captain Crunch, Wheaties, and more.

"Manifest?" he asked politely, holding out his hand. Lonnie pulled a couple of stapled sheets from his clipboard and handed them to him.

"They're all like you wanted. Unopened, vintage boxes… of cereal. A collector up in Buxton of all places had a thousand of these things." Hollis flipped through the manifest, reading the brands and expiration dates.

"This looks good," he eventually said. Lonnie scratched his head while glancing down at his clipboard.

"You know, I was supposed to tell you, like I was saying, that we have more where this came from. They said there were some older, more valuable, uh, specimens. Some of those boxes from the 70s are worth thousands of dollars to the right seller. We have them right over here if you want to take a look." Hollis had heard the same pitch from Michael on other occasions.

"I only need boxes from 1997 to 2003," he said as he began counting the boxes on his pallet and matching them to the manifest.

"The older ones are more valuable, but these have more potential. And the price is right." Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. Lonnie let out a breathy chuckle.

"Five thousand dollars for stale cereal. I've never seen anything like that in my life. Cereal box collecting.... pftt. Tell me you don't plan on eating it." Hollis laughed with the man. The jokes were old by now, but the relationship with the company was valuable.

"Strange as it sounds, this is my retirement plan," he said.

"You'll see one day." Lonnie laughed some more, slapping his clipboard against the side of his belly.

"I'll get this loaded up for you. We got a vending machine with chips in it in the break room if you're looking to collect those too." Hollis laughed along as Lonnie summoned a forklift driver to load the pallet into the back of Hollis' farm truck. He waved goodbye to Lonnie and the forklift driver as he drove away, hoping beyond hope that he would never need to return. ~~~ It was two hours' drive to reach Hollis' homestead in the back country.

The farmhouse was there when he purchased the land, but the outbuildings and fences were built with his own hands. An extensive garden ran from his back door to the woods in the distance. His rifle and archery range took up much of the land to the left of his driveway, but the right side was fenced off for the chickens and goats that circled in place upon seeing him arrive. As he began unloading the boxes, he looked around the property and really took it in. His horses galloped in the distance.

A deer hide was stretched out on a rack by the barn. The wind was clean out here. Things were quiet. He had spent years building this place, but it wasn't home. It was practice. He cut through the plastic wrap around the cereal boxes and loaded them inside an armful at a time. Eventually, he had them set up on the dining room table where he could look at them all together.

"Five thousand dollars," he said as he shook his head. He grabbed the first box and looked it over. Cornflakes. Expiration April 1999. A sixty-dollar box, unopened. A collector's item. He reached his finger up under the paperboard lip and ripped it from end to end. He turned it upside down and watched as a plastic bag filled with cornflakes fell to the table in front of him. There was nothing else inside. Food for the goats and chickens. That's what it was. They would enjoy it enough.

Next, he opened a box of Cheerios to the same result. Then Frosted Flakes and some Captain Crunch. One after the other disappointed him. As he tore through one box, a small, square CD sleeve fell to the table next to the cereal bag. His heart leapt, but only for a moment. He picked up the CD and read the cover. Captain Crunch's Crunchling Adventure. He had played that very same game as a kid. His brother Spencer had gotten it in a box of cereal just like this.

It was common back then to get computer games in cereal boxes. It was the main deciding factor in which type of cereal they would pick. He turned the game over in his hands.

"Not quite," he said as he stacked the CD on the table and went back to opening boxes. One container after another was ripped, tipped, and junked. All the while, Hollis became more disheartened. He had found more CDs. Mostly, they were movie tie-in games or free internet minutes from AOL or NetZero. The occasional toy popped out. Pikachu showed up on multiple occasions. He already had a collection of Pokémon started. Rip. Tip. Junk. He moved through the boxes faster and faster as he went.

A quarter of the way through. Then halfway. He didn't find what he was looking for. Finally, he was almost done. Ten boxes remained. His neck was stiff, and his nerves shot. He took a break to tend to the animals and get himself a drink from the kitchen. He was used to stretching out the disappointment by now. How many lots had he bid on and won? He had lost count. He had also lost a considerable amount of Bitcoin in the endeavor, but that wasn't real money anyway.

Back in the dining room, he picked up another box and paused. Was the box heavier? Oddly balanced? He wasn't sure. Something was off. Reese's Puffs. Expiration date, December 2000. A commercial jingle from the recesses of his memory started to play. There was no promotion on the box, but then, the box he was looking for wouldn't have a promotion. It wouldn't tell you what was inside. The prize he was after would never come with a warning.

He ripped the top off the box and tilted it over so fast that the bag of puffs flung across the room and fell to the floor instead of the table. But the CD inside didn't. It gently fell out of the box in its generic white sleeve and came down on the table without a sound. It was upside down. Hollis reached out and flipped it over with a single finger. After one glance, he lost his ability to stand and fell back into the dining room chair behind him, knocking the bag of trashed boxes to the ground.

He couldn't look away. The CD was rewritable, the kind that would be bought with a stack of dozens of others like it. Black sharpie spread across the top with the words, Return to Periapt scribbled quickly. The last time he had seen a CD like this in person, he was scraping its melted remains out of his family computer's disk drive. He had to stand. He had to walk… Down the hall, around the living room, it didn't matter. He needed to move.

With the disk in his hand, he visited his home gym where he had pushed his body to its limits. Next, he went to the large tank he had used to learn to hold his breath underwater. He toured his armory filled with centuries-old weapons he had collected with one goal: to be ready. After all these years, he could prove it existed. It wasn't just a meme. It wasn't mass hysteria or an internet creepypasta mixed with a convincing nightmare he misremembered.

All the lies he told himself to help him forget were proven wrong. It was real. Return to Periapt. The game that had made him afraid of blind corners and shadows. The game that had become his obsession. The thought of it moved him to tears. He finally had it in his possession, and he was about to play it one last time.