Chapter 2
Twenty minutes turned out to be twenty-five. Albert would be the first to agree that five minutes was hardly an eternity, but Brandy knew something about the box, something she was not willing to disclose over the phone. Now every minute passed like an hour as he sat in the second floor lounge of Lumey Hall, waiting to see what she knew.
There was something in my car when I left class today. Those words kept ringing in his ear. He remembered how he’d unlocked his car the previous evening and found the box sitting in the driver’s seat. It was a frightening experience. He did not even see it until he opened the door. Brandy at least found her package in broad daylight, but it still must have been unnerving, perhaps even more so since whoever left it there was bold enough to get into her car in the middle of a busy school day.
The box had Brandy’s name on it. Now Brandy had found something too, and in exactly the same way, no less. Perhaps it was no accident after all that he found himself in possession of the box.
At the other end of the room, two boys were playing table tennis. One was a skinny blond kid, his face a spattering of pimples. The other was of an average build with a red goatee that wasn’t quite thick enough yet to completely cover his chin. Nearby, a skinny girl with raven black hair cut short enough to stand on end sat in one of the plush chairs watching them. She was close enough to them in such an empty room to indicate that she was with them, but her eyes kept drifting from the boys to the door to her watch and back again, suggesting that she, too, was waiting for someone.
The steady plink-plunk sound of the ping-pong ball could be annoying at times, but tonight Albert found it and the occasional outbursts of frustration and excitement from the boys relaxing, almost hypnotic. It was a perfect distraction for his senses. Too much silence made him think too much and just lately that made his head hurt.
He was sitting off to one side of the room, positioned so that he could see out of the lounge and down the hallway to the main doors. Lumey was built on the slope of a hill, so on the back side of the building the first floor was the ground floor, but on the front—the side he was facing now—the main doors led in on the second floor. The visitor parking lot and the meters were located on this side of the building. Therefore, he’d determined that this was the direction from which Brandy would most likely enter.
He spotted her as she was climbing the steps. She was wearing a dark shirt and jeans, different from the shorts and tank top she’d been wearing that morning in lab. She was clenching a black leather purse in her left hand and carried a cigarette in her right.
Albert thought that there was something stiff about her. She looked tense. He watched her as she paused at the ashtray outside the door. She drew one last time from the cigarette and then crushed it. As she did so, she turned and looked around, as though she expected someone to be watching her.
Of course there was someone watching her, but he didn’t think that it was him she was looking around for.
Perhaps he was imagining it. Maybe she heard something somewhere, someone yelling or a car horn blaring. Maybe he was simply looking for things that weren’t there. Puzzling over the box for so many hours had caused his imagination to run a little wild.
At last she opened the door and walked in. Almost immediately, her eyes found him. Albert stood up and greeted her and immediately the smell of her cigarette tickled his nose. He was not a smoker and did not like the smell of cigarettes, but his mother smoked and he was used to it enough that he was not really bothered by it. He always said it would have to be a pretty fine line between yes and no to turn down a date based on whether a girl smoked.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said as she sat down.
“It’s okay.”
She did not relax at first. She held her purse in her lap and looked at him. Albert realized right away that there was something cold about her, as though he had done her some grave evil of which he was not yet aware. Her eyes were a soft and gorgeous shade of blue behind the gold-rimmed lenses of her small glasses, beautiful enough to be hypnotizing, but when she leaned forward they were focused so fiercely on him that it made him want to shrink away. “I’m just going to say right now that if this is some kind of practical joke I’m not going to be happy. There are laws against breaking into someone’s car, you know.”
Albert stared at her, his own dark eyes wide and shocked. Those words struck him like a hammer. He’d never even considered a practical joke. That cast a whole new light on the subject. What if someone was trying to pull something on him? What if someone somewhere was laughing his ass off at his silly obsession with that nonsense box? “If it’s a practical joke,” he said, almost numb with the realization of that possibility, “then we’re two cheeks on the same butt of it.”
Brandy watched his expression as he spoke, her eyes stony and piercing. Finally, after a moment, she laughed. It was a quick sound, a huff of air, almost a sigh. In an instant her features melted back into that sweet, ladylike girlishness that he’d seen so often in the classroom. She relaxed back into her chair, her posture slightly slouched, comfortable. She gazed at him through her glasses, her eyes once more soft and sweet. Her hair was very light blonde, a little past shoulder-length, straight and smooth with short bangs. She was wearing a simple, short-sleeved shirt, black with red patterns around the neck and sleeves. Albert couldn’t stop himself from noticing the low neckline. She was not big-breasted, but neither was she shapeless. She was quite pretty, blessed with a girlish figure and a soft and delicate complexion.
Overall, she was a sharp contrast to him. Whereas her hair and eyes were light and fair, his were dark and deep. Her nose and chin were soft and round, while his were straight and pronounced, almost pointed. He was rather short, although still a couple inches taller than she, and a little stocky, and he appeared bulky compared to the soft curves of her petite figure.
“I’m sorry,” said Brandy. “I don’t mean to accuse you of anything. I wasn’t trying to be a bitch.”
“No, don’t worry about it.”
“It’s just kind of scary, you know. Somebody got into my car while I was in class.”
“I understand. I mean this is some pretty weird stuff.”
“I almost threw it away. I didn’t want it, really. It kind of gave me the creeps.”
These words were like a slap in the face. She almost threw it away? “What did you get?”
She opened her purse and withdrew a small brown pouch. “I feel silly even bringing this to you, but I guess it sort of belongs to you.” She opened the pouch, which appeared to be made of soft, aged leather, pulled closed with a simple piece of coarse twine, and then emptied it into her left hand. She turned her eyes up to his as she held it out to him. “It’s a key.”
Albert stared at it for a moment before taking it from her. It was a flat piece of brass with a simple ring for a grip and a single tooth on each side. Just looking at it, he could understand why he was unable to pick the lock with the pocketknife. Even though the key was flat instead of round or grooved, it still required teeth to work the tumblers inside the lock.
He reached out and took it from her warm palm. He felt a million miles away, as though he were staring at it through a television set instead of holding it in his own fingers. It didn’t feel real. He turned it over, almost mesmerized, and suddenly he was drawn back with a slap. Seven letters were scratched onto this side of the key, just like on one side of the box. But instead of B R A N D Y R, the key read A L B E R T C.
“Albert Cross?” Brandy guessed.
“Seeing as how you’re the only Brandy R. I know and I’m probably the only Albert C. you know,” he replied, “I’d say it’s a pretty good bet.”
“Do you think whoever gave us these things got them mixed up? Mine had your name and yours had mine?”
Albert shook his head. “But then we wouldn’t know where to fin
d the other half.”
“Yeah. That’s true.” Brandy’s eyes dropped to the backpack at Albert’s feet. “Did you bring the box?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I see it?”
“Of course.” Albert unzipped the bag, removed the box and handed it to her. “After my American History class last night I walked out to my car and it was just waiting for me. I’m in there from six to nine. It was in the driver’s seat. I always lock my doors.”
Brandy held the box in her lap as she studied it. “My car was in the commuter lot next to Wuhr.” The Daniel R. Wuhr Building was the science and math building on campus. It was where their Chemistry classrooms were located. “It was right there in my driver’s seat after class today.”
“Did you have your doors locked?”
Brandy shrugged, almost embarrassed. “They were locked when I came back out, but I have a bad habit of not locking my doors. Whoever put the bag there could’ve locked them.”
Albert nodded. “I can’t be a hundred percent sure of mine, either, actually. I say I always lock them, but every now and then...”
Brandy stared at the box as she held it in her lap, her eyes fixed on the letters of her name. “I didn’t say anything earlier, but when you showed this to me the first time there was just something eerie about it. It gave me chills. I didn’t even want to touch it.” She turned it over in her hands, looking at each side. “I’m not sure I want to be holding it now.”
Albert said nothing. He watched her expression for a moment and then followed her gaze to the box.
“Brandy R.,” she read.
“Yeah. I guess we know for sure what that side means now.”
“You haven’t figured any of the other sides out?”
“Nope. Maybe they’ll make sense once we open it.” Albert looked down at the key he was holding. He could feel a cold tingle of excitement rising up his spine.
“Maybe.” Brandy turned the box again, observing the other sides. “Well these are all Beatles songs.”
Albert’s eyes snapped from the key to the box. “What?”
“‘Help’, ‘Come Together’ and ‘Yesterday’ are all songs by the Beatles.”
Albert stared at the words on the side of the box. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.” She glanced up at him, met his eyes for just a brief moment, then looked back down, as if she detected the hungry attention her revelation had drawn from him and was disturbed by it. “I like music. I listen to a lot of it. All different kinds. I don’t know what ‘G N J’ means, though.”
Albert felt numb. “The Beatles.” He might have recognized country or pop titles, but The Beatles?
“That doesn’t mean that’s what these mean,” Brandy explained. “It could just be a coincidence. But they are Beatles songs.”
“Wow. I’m impressed.”
Brandy looked up at him again. This time she smiled a little.
“Any clue about the other side?”
Brandy turned the box again and tried to read it. “Just looks like garbage to me.”
Albert nodded. “Yeah. Me too.”
“But these last two sides are a map, right?”
Albert nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t know what it’s a map of.”
“Maybe it’s inside.”
“Maybe.” He looked down at the key again. “Let’s see.”
Brandy looked up at him, but made no move to hand him the box. “Do you think we should?”
“What do you mean?”
Brandy shrugged. She looked extremely uncomfortable. “I’m just not sure about this. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to set this all up. Why?”
Albert stared back at her, unable to answer.
“I mean this thing still gives me the creeps. It’s just too weird. It’s like something out of a… I don’t know. An Alfred Hitchcock movie or… Or a Stephen King short story. It’s just not natural, you know.”
Albert looked down at the box. She was right. It was very unnatural. Inside, he’d understood that all along.
“I don’t want to sound crazy, but there’s a part of me that really thinks that maybe we should just throw it away. Forget about it.”
This suggestion hit Albert like a punch in the gut. How could he just forget about it? That box had commanded his every thought since he first laid eyes on it. But then again, wasn’t that reason enough to do just as she suggested? Perhaps she was right. Perhaps it was unhealthy, even dangerous.
The two of them sat there, each of them staring at the box.
“There’s also a part of me,” Brandy added, a little cautiously, “that still doesn’t trust you.”
Albert looked up at her, surprised.
“I mean I don’t know anything about this. One day, out of the blue, you show up to class with this box with my name on it and say you found it in your car. After class I go to my car and find a key with your name on it. And I really don’t know you.”
Albert lowered his eyes all the way to the floor. She certainly made a point. “That’s true.” He nodded and looked back up at her. “I guess I really can’t expect you to trust me. I really don’t have reason to trust you.”
Brandy started to say something, but she stopped herself.
“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 o
ut 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.