Hexenbox - now complete! 🇬🇧 (🇩🇪 translation in progress)

Chapter 2 - The Many Things

Again, it all goes straight to shit in hell. With chairs moving, tables turning, and cars crashing. Literally, all of it, of course. And it all—again!—starts with that freaking thing on her bedside table. Because someone put it there. The box. The God-darn box.

It's not where she is now.

The rain hits the New Jersey streets when she exits the subway, a small and light drizzle that nevertheless turns the world into something grey and dark. She walks down the street with her left leg in clamps, the vice with which she left the hospital after the incident in late January. The incident with the museum and the subway. And the thing she doesn't think about. The clamps, the vice turn everything into a stumble. Step, stumble, step. The weather doesn't help, of that at least, she's sure.

The shop sits in a side-alley, back from the main thoroughfare and with a surprisingly small patch of green between houses that all appear dated enough: old brickwork and large many-paned windows, offering a view into low-ceiled rooms and a wide array of antiques and books on display and, for some reason, one of these shops sells flowers. Like something packed away from older times. In the drizzle, it appears all the more so. A freaking witch market, something whispers to her, a voice in her own head. It doesn't help that she feels the weight of it in the bag over her shoulder.

It has been there. The box. Been there when she woke up in the hospital and after that incident, in the museum, the subway. Sat there on her bedside table. Black and brass and as if it wasn't anything unusual. Possibly, people had assumed that it was hers, though it gave her a nasty shock that had her recoil and sit up—tried to before the hurt exploded in her leg, almost blinding her until she realized that her entire left limb was set in an extension bandage dangling from above.

He told her about it. Later. The man in the dark blue coat, grey hair, grey beard. In the lobby of the Hard Rock Hotel, where everything is beautiful colors and memorabilia from rock and pop stars, and it smells of espresso and so and so on and for whatever goddamn reason of strawberry.

"That box is a curse," he said. "They brought a curse here."

"You cannot bring a curse," she answered. "And who is they?"

"The curator from the museum," he said without spending so much as a goddamn word on the main thing here, the curse. "Maximilian Shackleton. Went missing late last autumn. With a group of 36. A few days later he reappeared. Alone. Hanged himself a fortnight after."

She considered the info.

"There is an entry in his calendar," he went on. "Shortly before the group disappeared. A place he went to." He looked at her in a supposedly meaningful way. "I cannot go there. They don't talk to me."

And now she is here, standing in front of this God-forsaken shop and finds herself crying. Crying like a five-year-old, all silent tears. It's not like anyone would see in the drizzle, drenching everything. In front of a shop! Jesus Saint, in front of a goddamn bloody shop!

"I cannot give you this task," he said. "I cannot."

Now, he has been right about that, has he? Because she's not here. In her mind it's Syria; in her mind it's the New York subway; in her mind, it's her lying there helplessly in the devastation with the dead scattered all around. And she can't ... She just... Holy, sweet Jesus, she just can't ...

"You're not answering my question," she said to him.

"Right." He sat back a bit, pausing. "We have to bring it back," he said then. "The box."

That wasn't enough for her. Not a single bit enough. "Where to?"

"To the grave it came from."

She sat there, very still, staring at him. "I have seen enough graves for a lifetime," she whispered and it wasn't meant for him.