My grandmother was a mean, hateful old bitch who never had a kind word for anyone – including her own family. So I wasn’t exactly heartbroken when the old bag died peacefully in her sleep earlier this month at the age of eighty-seven.
My father was the only one of her six children to attend the funeral, and only then out of a sense of obligation because he had been her oldest and arguably favorite…not that that had spared him from the verbal (and sometimes physical) abuse he and his siblings had endured from her growing up.
After she was buried my folks tasked me with the job of clearing out her apartment, since all her children had cut ties with her long before and wanted nothing to do with her in death. They told me I could keep whatever I wanted, and to donate the rest to Goodwill.
I had to wait until the weekend before last, when I was off, to get started. Honestly, there wasn’t much that caught my fancy; my grandmother had never been exactly well-off and most of the stuff in her apartment was just the typical cheap, garage-sale-quality junk you’d expect to find in the home of an elderly woman on Social Security: old broken-down appliances, dingy, worn-out furniture, chipped dishes, mismatched utensils, musty old clothes that probably hadn’t been worn in decades, that type of stuff.
She was apparently something of a hoarder because her apartment was absolutely crammed with that crap. It took me two days and nine trips to get rid of it all.
In the end, there was only one thing that sparked my interest.
One of the few things my grandmother had shown a fondness for was jigsaw puzzles. It had been her lifetime hobby, and there were literally hundreds of them cluttering the corner of her bedroom, stacked almost to the ceiling.
I flipped through them out of idle curiosity, tossing most of them into a cardboard box after a cursory glance at the pictures on the front of the boxes – landscapes, still lives, famous architecture (the Eiffel Tower, The Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty), etc.
But one box gave me pause. There was no illustration on its front or back.
Most people would have just shrugged and thrown it in with the rest, but not me. One thing you should know about me is I’m a bit obsessive compulsive. And one thing I absolutely detest is an unanswered question. I’m the kind of person who, if they’re driving in their car with the radio on and a song ends just as they arrive at their destination, they have to sit there and wait to hear what the next song’s going to be. Otherwise, the mystery will nag at their mind for the rest of the day. Yeah, I guess I’m a bit weird in that regard.
Anyway, I decided to take the mysterious jigsaw puzzle back with me and put it together to see what its subject matter was.
When I got home that Sunday night, after I had finally finished emptying out Grandma’s apartment, I opened the blank cardboard box that contained the puzzle, intending to get started assembling it. Instead, I winced. It was one of those big ones, at least a thousand pieces, and probably closer to two thousand. There was no way I could get it done in just one night; this was the work of at least two whole days, maybe three.
I had to work the next five days so I chose to put off the puzzle until the next weekend, setting it aside for the time being.
My work week passed pretty uneventfully, and come Friday late afternoon, with nothing else planned for the next two days, I set about the Herculean task of putting the jigsaw puzzle together. I dumped the contents of the box onto my kitchen table, opened a Monster energy drink and sat down to begin. After flipping all the pieces over to the right side, I could see this wasn’t going to be a quick and easy job. The puzzle was almost entirely white with little bits of black text in different sizes, and only a few splotches of color. There were no recognizable shapes or patterns to act as clues to whatever it was supposed to depict.
I shrugged, resigned, and started with the corners like you’re supposed to. That alone took almost three hours, but at last I had the outer edge of the puzzle assembled.
I worked for another two hours, fitting in a few pieces here and there, working my way in from the outside, but by then it was going on eleven and I was getting hungry. I decided to call it a day and make some late dinner, then go to bed and get an early start the next day to finish it.
Saturday morning I picked up right where I had left off. By 6 P.M. I figured I was a quarter of the way finished. It was taking longer than I had expected, so I quit for the day and spent the rest of the evening playing GTA on Xbox.
Sunday morning (four days ago) I was right back at it. At that point I had some idea what the picture was. It looked like some kind of document, maybe a magazine article or a newspaper story, but there were only a few fragments of words and phrases that I could read and by themselves, without context, they made no apparent sense.
I broke for lunch at noon, then dove straight back in with renewed vigor, more determined than ever to break this enigma.
Hours crept by. By three the puzzle was halfway completed. By six, three quarters. And at nine o’clock Sunday night, I fitted the last piece in place.
I stared at the finished image silently, feeling my skin crawl. I had grown increasingly uneasy over the last couple hours as more and more of the picture came together and the bits and pieces of letters and words coalesced into a coherent text.
It was the front page of a national newspaper. The smaller printing made up an article. The larger, bolder letters formed the headline. And the colored splotches were a photograph.
The headline declared a simple, chilling statement in capital letters: HELL ON EARTH. THE END IS UPON US!
The picture showed a view of Washington, D.C. I know because I could recognize the White House in the background…what was left of it, anyway. The city was in ruins, the buildings shattered and in flames, the streets littered with rubble, smashed cars, and charred corpses.
There was an enormous figure in the distance, mostly cloaked in smoke from the ruined city. A colossal, monstrous horned shape, vaguely humanoid in form, towering to the sky and dwarfing the wrecked and smoldering cityscape below it.
I didn’t read the article. I didn’t need to, the photograph spoke for itself.
Shaken, I swiped the completed jigsaw puzzle off the table. It smashed to the floor, pieces scattering.
I couldn’t get that awful picture out of my mind.
And there was something else. Right before I knocked the puzzle away, I noticed the date on the newspaper.
Friday, August 26, 2022.
That was four days ago. It is now the early morning of August 25th.
I want to believe it’s just an eerie coincidence. But I found that puzzle in the middle of a stack that had probably been standing in my grandmother’s bedroom undisturbed for years. What are the odds?
I called in sick for the week. For the past four days I’ve been sitting in front of my TV watching the news, waiting to see what happens tomorrow.
I always hated unanswered questions. But some things are best left unknown.