The Box (3 page)

“As far as I know,
you
could’ve left that box in my car. After all, I have no way of knowing whether you’re telling me the truth about how you came by this key. For the same reason, you have no way of knowing how I came by that box or that I didn’t put the key in your car.”

“Yesterday you beat me to class and I left before you did…”

Albert was impressed. She’d really thought this through. “But I could’ve had an accomplice.”

“Yeah.”

He leaned back against the cushions of the couch and stared down at the key. Three more people had entered the room since Brandy arrived. Two were young men who were speaking a language he could not place and playing a game of chess. The third was a young woman with a huge mane of curly black hair and a surprisingly unattractive face. She was sitting alone by one of the windows with a Dean Koontz novel in her hand. The girl who was with the ping-pong players still seemed to be waiting on whoever it was she was expecting. “You don’t really seem like the kind of person who would ever want to do me wrong,” he said at last.

“Neither do you,” said Brandy.

“But we don’t know each other.”

“Exactly.”

Albert continued to stare at the key.

“But so what if we’re both telling the truth?” Brandy asked after a moment. “Then what?
Somebody
sent these things.
Somebody
scratched our names into them. That person knows what cars we drive, what classes we have, when we’re in class and God only knows what else. So then who was it? Why would they do something like this? I’d rather think that
you
were trying to prank me. The fact that someone else out there is capable of this sort of stunt is way worse.”

Albert could think of no reply for her. Come to think of it, how could anyone have known to leave that box in his car the previous night? It was the first time he’d ever driven to his night class. He didn’t know until the previous weekend that the campus police stopped ticketing after five o’clock.
He
didn’t even know he was going to drive until just before he left. He’d intended to drive only on rainy days, but he decided to see how much time it saved him.

That meant that someone must have been watching either him or his car that evening. The thought of a pair of eyes lurking unseen somewhere out there sent a shiver down his spine.

Two more students walked into the room together. One was a stout young man with short black hair and a thick, black goatee. The other was a rather plain-looking blonde girl with remarkably large breasts. The shorthaired girl stood up from the couch as they approached and greeted them both with a hug.

“So what do we do?” Brandy asked after a moment.

Albert held up the key. “I guess we open it,” he replied. “We’re both here. We have it. What can it hurt to open it and look inside? Maybe we’ll figure out what it all means.”

Brandy held onto the box, still not sure. She looked at the key for a moment, then looked up at Albert and said in a voice that was nearly a whisper, “What if it’s a bomb or something?”

Albert hadn’t considered a bomb. He stared down at the box, his thoughts whirling. Why would it be a bomb? But why not? Why crash airplanes into the World Trade Center? There was no end to the number of horrors that could be hidden in a box like this. He could almost imagine turning the key and watching it fly open as some hellish creature burst from within, its vicious jaws tearing the flesh from his body before he knew what was upon him.

He shook these thoughts away and met Brandy’s eyes. “If it is,” he decided at last, “we probably won’t feel it.”

Brandy’s face paled at the thought of such an abrupt and brutal end. “I guess that’s true,” she said after a moment.

“With or without you,” Albert said. “I think I have to open it. I have to know what’s going on.”

Brandy gazed back at him. “Why?”

“It’s just who I am. I’ve always loved a good mystery. I read mysteries, I watch them, I can almost always figure out who did it.” He looked down at the box. “This is the first
real
mystery I’ve ever come across. I guess I feel like, even if it’s dangerous—stupid even—to open it, I want to.” He shrugged and lowered his eyes. He felt foolish. “I feel like, above all else, I
want
this to be something real, you know?”

Brandy stared at him, surprised. “Yeah. I guess I do.”

“I’m not saying we should. I don’t know. Probably we shouldn’t. I’m just saying I
want
to.”

She nodded. “Okay.” She moved the box closer to him, resting it on her knees, and then turned it so that the keyhole faced him. “I guess I do too.”

He looked up at her, relieved that she understood him. He wanted to ask her if she was sure, but he didn’t dare tempt her to reconsider. “Ready?”

Again, she nodded.

Slowly, Albert slid the key into the lock and began to turn it. For a moment he could feel the key searching for the slot—he still did not know which end was up—and then it fell into place and he felt the lock begin to turn. It moved sluggishly, as though stiff with age. When he had turned it a complete ninety degrees, a firm click announced that the lock was sprung and the key stopped in his fingers.

The two of them sat there for a moment, staring at the box. It was unlocked now, or at least they could only assume that it was, but they still didn’t know how it was supposed to open.

“Now what?” Brandy asked, looking at Albert.

He did not know.

“I heard it unlock.”

“So did I.”

“So how does it open?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t figure that out before when I was looking at it.” He began to pull the key from the keyhole and after a moment of fumbling, the box began to open. It was now that it finally made sense to him. The box appeared seamless when he first examined it, except of course for those seams that one would expect to find in a wooden box, those where the wood was glued together. There were no hinges because the box did not have the kind of lid he’d been looking for. Instead, it consisted of two separate pieces, one inside the other. As he pulled the key out, the entire front side slid outward from the rest of the box.

“I see,” Albert said. “It’s like a drawer.” It quickly became obvious that the box was lying on its side and he picked it up and turned it. Brandy’s name was carved on the top of the box while part of the map made up the bottom.

“How’d you know to pull on the key like that?”

Albert glanced up at her. “I didn’t. I was just trying to take it out.”

She did not respond and Albert felt an odd sense of guilt. He could almost read her thoughts as she wondered if perhaps he’d been aware of how the box worked all along. “It’s a really good fit,” he observed, trying to keep her attention on the box itself. “You couldn’t tell that the wood wasn’t glued there, but it wasn’t stuck closed, either.” This was true. More true, in fact, than he cared to elaborate on. He pushed the box closed again for a moment and examined the seams. The fit was so perfect that there was not even the slightest movement when they were together, especially when the lock was turned. As he pulled it open again, he saw that there were small but formidable bolts on all four sides of the keyhole side of the inner box, and four no-doubt perfectly sized holes to receive the bolts in the outer box, like the deadbolt on a door, but four times as secure.

Still Brandy said nothing. Her silence felt like an accusation of some heinous crime for which he did not have an alibi.

Albert opened the box and peered inside. It would do no good to try and talk his way out of any suspicion. If she intended to blame him, there was nothing he could do to change her mind. The more he tried, the guiltier he would be perceived.

Besides,
he
knew he was innocent.

He hoped that opening the box would lead him to some answers, but as he gazed in at the contents, he quickly realized that there were only more questions within.

Random junk was all he found. There was a flat piece of rusted metal, a small stone, a dull metal object that he realized after a moment’s consideration was a brass button, a dirty black feather and a silver pocket watch that might have been an antique, but was corroded far beyond any real value.

“What is all that?” Brandy asked, leaning forward until their foreheads were almost touching. “Does it mean anything?”

Albert shook his head. He did not know. He reached in and removed the watch. Its lid was loose, but still intact. Carved into the front was an elegant letter G. It was dirty, as were all the objects in the box, as though they had been dropped in mud at some point, and he used his thumb to clean the dirt from the design. Did the “G” indicate the owner of the watch, he wondered, or the company that manufactured it? Maybe he would look it up on the Internet sometime. He opened the cover and was surprised to find that the glass was still intact. Except for its apparent age, it was in surprisingly good condition. He found the stem and tried to wind it, half expecting it to start working again, but the insides had apparently not aged as well as the rest. The hands would not turn.

“Is it broken?”

Albert nodded. “Yeah.” He handed it to her so that she could see it and then removed the feather. There was nothing very special about it. It wasn’t from a very large bird. It was dirty and rather ratty-looking, like it was simply plucked from the gutter somewhere and dropped into the box.

Brandy placed the watch back into the box and removed the button. There were no distinguishing markings on it. It appeared to be a simple, old-fashioned brass button.

Albert dropped the feather back into the box and withdrew the stone. It was dark gray in color, about an inch in length, semi-cylindrical, with a strange texture. There were small creases along the sides. He rubbed away the dirt with his thumb and forefinger and saw that both ends were rough, as though it had been broken from a larger object.

Brandy dropped the button back into the box. “Does this stuff make any sense to you?”

“Not a bit.” Albert dropped the stone back into the box and removed the final object. After turning it over in his fingers several times he concluded that it was the broken tip from some sort of knife. It was large enough to be from a dagger or a sword and, looking at the condition it was in, it certainly wasn’t stainless steel. The original blade could have been just about anything.

“It’s just junk.”

“I know.” Albert dropped the blade piece back into the box and fished out the button. As he examined it, four more people entered the room and sat down at the card table by the window. He recognized them immediately as the residents of the suite down the hall from his own. One of them was already shuffling a deck of cards and soon they would be immersed in a game. Albert saw them here often. Hearts seemed to be their game of choice, but he had already seen them play everything from Spades to Poker.

The room would only get more crowded as the night went on. By eight o’clock the only place that would be busier than the lounges was the computer room on the first floor. Albert tried to go there once just to check out the facilities, in case his own computer ever failed to meet his needs, and he was not even able to get in the door.

Brandy leaned back in the chair and looked sternly at Albert. “So what does it all mean then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Someone went to all the trouble of getting us together to open this fucking thing, so what are we supposed to get from it?”

Albert met her eyes for a moment and then dropped the button back into the box. He’d heard plenty of swearing in his life, as much from women as from men. Hell, his sister swore like a sailor when they were growing up. And he’d already heard Brandy swear plenty of times in the short time he’d been acquainted with her—she always seemed to be coming up with some delightfully creative expletive during their lab experiments—but it still surprised him somehow every time he heard something vulgar pass from her lips. She projected such a girlishly polite image that it was hard to imagine her as anything but young and innocent, virgin even. Of course, that wasn’t to say that it was unattractive by any means. On the contrary, he actually found it to be something of a turn-on.

“I really don’t know,” he said after a moment. “You’d think there’d be something more.”

Someone walked into the room and looked around, as though looking for someone. Albert glanced at her and recognized her as Gail from across the hall. He wondered vaguely if her presence here might indicate that Derek was no longer in her room. If so, he hoped he wasn’t hanging out when he returned to
his
room. After a quick look around, Gail turned and left the lounge. Whoever she was looking for obviously wasn’t here.

“This is ridiculous.” Brandy closed the box, lifted it off her knees and dropped it into his lap. “I don’t get it. I don’t really care to get it.” She grabbed her purse and stood up.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving. You can keep all that. The key too. I’m not interested.”

Albert stared at her, surprised. “You’re not even curious?”

She half turned as she slipped the thin strap of her purse over her shoulder. For a moment she paused, as though struggling with herself. “Yes,” she said at last, her eyes fixed on the door. “If you come up with anything, let me know tomorrow in lecture.”