Alarmingly Strange Stories
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After a minute or two of silence Dan opened the backpack- reverently, slowly- and brought out a box wrapped in plain brown paper, tied clumsily with string. Although the box was large enough to completely fill the backpack, it looked pitifully small and insignificant under the crumbling walls of the ruins and the heavy gray sky above. Scrawled on the side of the box in pencil were the words "the ruin man," and a withered yellow flower was tucked under the string like a pitiful gift, or an offering. Bianca reached out and lay her hand on the box, gently. It had been three weeks since she first heard Dan talk about the ruin man. It had been a bleak May morning when Bianca huddled against the wall of the school library with Dan and their friends Amy and Scott to hear about the ruin man. Dan seemed very pale and almost inhuman, and he told then that he found something in the bushes down in the ruins on Cannery Row. "Something alive," he had said, blue eyes intensely bright. "It's alive. It's a god." Bianca had chuckled nervously and they all stared at Dan with his stringy black hair falling gently around his face. "A god? What do you mean?" "The ruin man. That's what he calls himself: the ruin man. Only he's not really a man; just the head." The small group glanced at each other. Amy twirled her finger around in a circle by her head: he's crazy. "A disembodied head?" Scott grimaced. "Bullshit." "Uh, Scott..." Bianca muttered, drawing him and Amy aside. "Do you think he's joking?" "Of course he's joking. You don't really think..." "No!" Bianca interrupted, quickly. "Of course not. I just think that, well, Dan's been under a lot of stress lately, and..." "Maybe he just snapped!" wailed Amy.

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