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

Chapter 3 - The Nightmare Beyond

The God-forsaken box starts communicating with her. It doesn't do so by talking. It leaves little scraps of paper, and it takes a while until she understands that it's the box giving her directions. It gets worse from here.

It takes her half an hour to get to the 'prophet.' She texts the man in the blue coat, Haythorne, where she's going. It begins to rain again when she exits the subway, this time in earnest, with heavy weather coming in from the sea. Plunging the world into an even more premature sunset darkness. She remembers the coat the man—Haythorne!—gave her.

"Why would I need that?"

"Experience," he said. "Seeing as we are both not as quick as we were." He didn't have to point to both their injured legs.

She accepted it without thinking she would really need it, the coat. Now she does. It's a rusty brown when she unstraps it from its place under her messenger bag and shakes it out. A rusty brown all right and a bit too wide, and why doesn't that surprise her?

The prophet resides in an alleyway off 42nd Street with high buildings all around. Trash containers stand about, the air stale and fetid despite the rain. There is a roofed entrance here, where maybe trucks unloaded in the past, giving shelter. The 'prophet' is here, a man of maybe fifty-something, although it's hard to say with the white beard and round glasses and the tweet coat, sitting there on a sleeping bag.

"Why here?" she asks him.

He gets up, brushing his coat down. He's smaller than she thought. "Because trash is dead," he says.

Her phone vibrates with a text coming back. Haythorne. Good, it reads. Don't go any further, though. Wait for me.

She pulls out the box. Carefully. Ever so carefully.

The man, the 'prophet', takes two steps back. Stares at it.

"No one wants to tell me anything," she says. "I need to return it."

"Brave," he says. "But futile. The great mysteries behind the world. You won't be able to cope."

Somehow, this triggers her. She's seen enough. "You don't know shit about me."

He examines her through small eyes and for the first time, there is something there that scares her. His eyes are old and cold, like something under foreign stars. Makes her uneasy. For the first time, he seems to recognize the braces around her leg, a section that the coat doesn't quite cover.

"Knight," he says.

It's so strange, so outlandish, but her answer comes to her without much thinking. "Death," she tells him as if correcting him. "The box is death."

"It's from him, is it? The man last autumn."

She doesn't even nod.

"And you want to bring it back?"

"Yes," she says.

He needs a minute. Takes a few steps and stares out into the rain. "Had I known," he says, but it's like talking to himself. Like talking to the rain. "Had I known..."

Then, in the most abrupt way, he turns around. "Where you're going is not a kind place. The place itself is... death."

"I don't care," she says.

He looks at her, looks into the rain, then back at her with those eyes that maybe have seen too much.

"Now," he tells her. "Before I think again."

It's the first time she hesitates. She remembers the message Haythorne just sent her: Don't go any further. It doesn't need much thinking, though. The cards are all on the table. Have been there in that goddamn alleyway, even before she entered that antique shop or whatever that had been. She has made her decision there. It has cost her all the tears already. And there's no use going freaking back.