Текст книги "The box"

Автор книги: Brian Harmon

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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.”

“Okay.” He could not believe she was just walking away from this. How could she? It was such a delicious mystery. Sure, the lack of answers inside the box was discouraging, even aggravating, but it was also all the more intriguing. These new questions were even more alluring than the first. How could anyone just walk away from such an enigma? Perhaps she was only being the more mature one, even the smarter one, but to just drop it and walk away? The very ability to do such a thing seemed so alien to him.

“I just don’t like it,” she explained before she walked away, as though she could feel the weight of his eyes and read the questions inside his head. “It’s just… I don’t know. It’s just too much. I don’t want to be a part of something I don’t know anything about.”

Albert nodded. He understood. It was probably the right thing to do. Nonetheless, he was disappointed.

“Bye.” Brandy walked out of the room as a very pretty redhead entered and dropped into one of the soft chairs with a textbook.

Albert watched her go without getting up. It felt surprisingly sad knowing that this mystery was once again his alone.

Chapter 3

After leaving the second floor lounge, Albert slowly made his way back toward his room, his mind flooded with questions both old and new. He intended to go straight to his bed and lie down for a while, perhaps even retire for the night if his mind would take so long a break, but when he saw the door to his room standing wide open, he walked on by without pausing. He was in no mood for Derek this evening. He was particularly in no mood for Derek’s horrible taste in television. Besides, right now he wanted to be alone with his thoughts.

He walked to the far end of the hallway, descended the stairs and then exited the building through the back doors. He did not have any particular destination in mind. He merely wanted to take a walk, but he’d barely reached the steps when he remembered that he had not yet eaten dinner.

He crossed the street, climbed the steps of the University Center and then made his way downstairs to the cafeteria. This was where he’d eaten every meal since his arrival at Lumey. There was a larger cafeteria over in the Cube, where he’d been told the selection was far greater, but so far he’d seen no reason to walk halfway across campus when he was not yet bored with the menu here.

The dining area was pretty busy at this time of night, but it would be slowing down soon. Already the lines at the registers were beginning to shorten. Albert selected a cheeseburger, chips and a soda out of convenience—ham on a croissant from the sandwich shop would have been better, but he didn’t feel like relaying his order to the lady at the counter—and then sought out a relatively private table at the far end of the room.

Often when he’d come here, the noise and the crowd would bother him, but tonight he actually enjoyed the atmosphere. Tonight, there was something very comforting about being alone in a room filled with people.

He unwrapped his cheeseburger and took a bite. He didn’t feel terribly hungry. In fact, there was an unpleasant warmth in his belly, a sick sort of knot. He told himself he was merely tired, his mind overworked from trying to solve the riddles of the box all day, but he knew the feeling was mostly to do with Brandy.

That she could just walk away like that… How could she not want to know? How could she just leave and go about her life like nothing happened? He supposed she only did the responsible thing. Perhaps he was nothing more than a fool for thinking such a ridiculous box deserved such obsession, but he couldn’t help it. The box was simply too intriguing to pass up. It was a riddle. And he’d always loved a good riddle. It was his thing. It was what he was good at. He was smart like that.

…Too smart to actually believe that this was really about any of that.

It was simple disappointment.

Still chewing his cheeseburger, he withdrew the key Brandy gave him from his jeans pocket and looked at it. It was so simple; just a perfectly flat piece of metal, less than an eight of an inch thick, with no grooves of any kind. Only the simple shape of the teeth on either side allowed it to open the box, and yet the box itself was so finely crafted, with such an elaborate locking mechanism. The two just didn’t seem to go together.

Sort of like he and Brandy, he supposed. But for just a few minutes…

A loud outburst from a few tables over drew him from his thoughts. He glanced over and surveyed the five people sitting there—two young men, three girls, all about the same age, perhaps a year ahead of him—and then turned his eyes back to his dinner.

He focused his concentration onto the key itself and began to review the things he’d found inside the box. The feather. The broken, rusted blade. The brass button. The silver pocket watch. The stone. What did they all mean? It all seemed like so much junk, but at the same time there was something else. There was something about them that tickled his brain, a strange sort of sense to be made from all the items in the box. It was a strange sort of sense in the simple fact that they made no sense. None of the things in the box fit together and that was exactly why the whole thing fit together. It was like a game, a tangled web of mysteries that each promised a key to solving the others. If someone meant it as a practical joke, they were good, and they knew him well enough to know that he’d be hooked. And this was precisely why he did not think that it was a practical joke.

It was strange, the way this kept drawing him in. He felt continuously compelled to return to the box, as if some unseen force was pushing him along, encouraging him to see the answers.

Once he was finished eating, he picked up the backpack and placed it in his lap. He intended to reach inside and open the box so that he could take another look at the items within, but as he reached for it, he caught sight of the carved words on one of the sides.

“Help,” “Come Together” and “Yesterday.” He’d almost forgotten. According to Brandy, these were all songs by The Beatles. Maybe the items inside the box weren’t what he was supposed to gain from Brandy’s visit. Maybe it was this small bit of knowledge. But what did it mean?

“Three songs,” he muttered to himself, hardly aware that he was speaking aloud. Not just three songs, but three songs by the same group. That made it less likely to be a coincidence. If he’d been more into music, he might have made this connection as well, but he wasn’t very familiar with the music of The Beatles.

Songs. Singing. Music. He read the last line to himself several times, the one that Brandy had not recognized:

G N J

Albert stood up, slipped the backpack over his shoulders and walked away from the table. He no longer noticed the people around him. He threw away his garbage on his way out of the cafeteria and then climbed the stairs and left the building heading south across campus. The three song titles circled again and again through his thoughts. Music. Perhaps it was a long shot, but just maybe whoever carved those song titles into the box was referring to the university’s music building.

The music building was on the other side of campus, next to the field house. Albert made his way south on Third Street, then west on Pole Street, which passed by the Cube. The Cube was four identical eight-story dormitories built together in a square. This was the main dormitory on campus, where better than half of all the resident students lived. He passed the Cube, crossed Redwood Avenue and then left Pole heading south on a sidewalk that took him past the art building and the field house to the music building.

Albert walked around to the front, taking in his surroundings as he walked, and paused in front of the main doors. There was a large sign over the door, proclaiming the building as Juggers Hall. Until he arrived here, he hadn’t been able to remember the name of the music building.

Juggers.

He stepped through the front doors and found himself in an empty lobby. His hunch was growing into something more certain and he was able to find what he was looking for immediately. On one of the walls, hanging over a row of chairs that looked soft and cozy, but probably weren’t, was a large portrait of a balding, silver-haired gentleman in an expensive suit. He wore a thick mustache and an air of kind authority. Beneath the portrait, on an engraved plate, was the name Dr. George Nicholas Juggers.

George Nicholas Juggers.

G. N. J.

He’d found it.

He sat down beneath George Nicholas Juggers—his hunch about the coziness of the chairs was correct—and opened his backpack. “Help,” “Come Together” and “Yesterday” were song titles, and the GNJ referred to this building. Albert turned the box in his hands. First Brandy. He’d shown the box to Brandy and when Brandy found the key, she brought it to him. More important than the key, however, was that she’d brought him the answer to the second clue. Songs. He’d made the connection between song titles and music and followed his instincts to the music building, where he was rewarded with the third clue. Now he knew where to look. And what he was looking for were those last three lines. An I and a Z—or was it a one and a Z? The second line still looked like a roman numeral seven, but there was no way of knowing for sure. And the last line could’ve been anything.

He stood up and looked around the room. There were soda machines against the wall and an elevator machine room in one corner, two tables and about a dozen of those falsely cozy chairs, but there was nothing that appeared to match any of the markings on the box. He spent several minutes pacing around the room, examining everything, but there was nothing there.

His first thought was that the songs narrowed it down to the building and the initials narrowed it down to the room, but maybe the initials were just another part of the previous clue. He set off down the hallway, peering into any rooms that were open or that offered windows through which he could see. He took the stairs up to the second and then third floor and then took the elevator down to the basement.

Nothing.

Eventually he found his way around to the back of the building and he stepped outside. Perhaps the next day he would tell Brandy what he’d found and she could help him determine what the last clues meant. Already the janitors who were vacuuming the carpets up on the third floor were beginning to give him strange looks. He could hardly blame them. He was creeping around like a thief looking for something to steal, cradling a strange wooden box in his arms. He’d be lucky if they didn’t call campus security on him.

He was about to walk back into the building for one last look around when something caught his eye.

No, that wasn’t right. It didn’t catch his eye. It was as though something compelled him to turn and look back, as though a soft voice had whispered from that direction, begging him to turn and see.

For a moment he didn’t see anything, just the sidewalk, some trees, the billowing white smoke of the power plant beyond, the darkening sky above. There was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing he couldn’t see walking out of any other building. But then he saw it, right there in plain sight, yet well hidden. He’d walked past so many of them. They were all over campus. It was the panic button.

These big red buttons were attached to six-foot posts all over campus and wired directly to the campus security headquarters in the administration building. In the event of an emergency, one push of this button would bring the campus police rushing to this location.

There were dozens of these buttons on campus, but no two were exactly identical. They each displayed a different number above the button, identifying the station. This particular button was number twelve.

It wasn’t a Z at all. It was a number two. A one and a two. Twelve.

Albert felt certain that this was the first of the three clues on this final side of the box, but he felt neither excited nor proud to have found it. Instead, he suddenly felt very creepy. What made him turn and look at the panic button in the first place? It was as though something reached into his head and made him see it.

No. That was preposterous. He simply saw it immediately, registered it subconsciously and then reacted to it a moment later. That was all.

Still, something felt very weird. Perhaps it wasn’t right. He walked over to the button and examined it. Except for the number twelve and the warning sign that hung beneath it, there was nothing. He turned and looked around him, convinced that this was the wrong solution after all. But then he found the second clue staring down at him from the roof of Juggers Hall. A tower rose up from the center of the roof and a large clock-face stared back at him. On that clock face, directly between roman numerals six and eight, was the second clue.

Albert stared up at the clock, unable to believe what he saw. What he did next he did almost without thinking. Standing in front of the number twelve panic button, he stared up at the clock and traced a straight line with his eyes from the center of the clock, past the seven and down to the ground. There, set into the concrete was a large metal plate, an entrance to the tunnel that ran beneath the sidewalk.

He walked over to this metal covering and found the final clue. Near one corner, a number was stamped into the metal:

1005T

There was no way to know what that number meant, or how to read it. This particular chunk of metal could have been manufactured almost anywhere in the world. It could have been designed for anything and then salvaged and used here as a way to keep students from trespassing. But here it was, looking him in the face, the answer to the riddle of the box.

The tunnels. The map that made up the last two sides of the box could only be of the steam tunnels beneath the campus.

He looked back up at the building in front of him. Finding this number should have excited him, but instead the discovery disturbed him. The number on the plate was so absolute, so distinctive, that there was no denying that it was exactly where the box was leading him. Where else would he find 1005T? But the clues leading up to it were so subtle. Sure the first four words spelled out song titles, even titles all belonging to a single band, a very popular band, no less, but it seemed like such a leap of faith to jump from related song titles to the campus music building. Why did it not occur to him instead to check the music store at the mall, or to look the Beatles up on the Internet? Or why not find those three songs and listen to them, or look up the lyrics to see if they had anything in common? He was very talented at solving puzzles and riddles, so why was his only thought the campus music building?

The initials, he thought. G. N. J. Every building on campus was named after someone. The Craw Building was named after William Craw. Wuhr was named after Daniel Wuhr. His dormitory was named after Walter Lumey. Initials led to a name, a name led to a building, a building having something in common with music…

No. It was too much of a leap, too doubtful. If the location of this metal cover was actually meant to be found, whoever encrypted it had placed an enormous amount of faith in his ability to make such a connection. After all, when he thought of the music building he didn’t think of songs so much as instruments. He thought of marching bands, not rock bands.

And presuming he did actually make the connection, it took an even greater leap of faith to expect him to spot the number twelve from the back door of the building, especially when he was looking for a Z.

Maybe that was precisely the point. Maybe whoever sent the box intended for the puzzle to be too difficult to solve.

Albert frowned at this idea. That made even less sense. Why send the box at all then? No, that wasn’t logical in the least. He looked up at the clock face. Perhaps whoever carved the number into the box did not think about his two being mistaken for a Z. Would the number twelve have been such a hard thing to find if he’d known what he was looking for? Somehow he doubted it. Twelve was a relatively common number. It probably appeared dozens of times in and around the building. Room twelve was one example.

Most unlikely of all, he realized, was the understanding that one needed to actually stand in front of the post with the number on it and recognize the seven o’clock digit as an arrow pointing away from the center of the clock face toward an inconspicuous metal plate set into the sidewalk several yards from the nearest corner of the building. Shouldn’t his first thought have been to try and find a way into the clock tower to look for the final clue? Or to make some sort of numerical or symbolic connection with the number seven or the seven o’clock hour?

He remembered the strange double-take he’d done to recognize the panic button, as if something had whispered into his very brain. He tried to remember exactly what it was that made him look again, but he couldn’t quite recall.

This wasn’t how he usually thought his way through a puzzle. The solutions came in logical steps, not gut feelings. He followed a path, unlocked the clues…

He forced the idea out of his head and stuffed the box back into his backpack. That was stupid. He’d just gotten lucky, that was all. He’d found the solution quickly instead of turning up a hundred dead ends before locating the tunnel entrance. But all the way back to Lumey, he kept glancing back over his shoulder, half expecting someone to be watching him.