Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Dwayne Carlisle: The Secretary

I was the first into the club room the day the Box appeared, so it probably makes sense I should be the one telling the story. I came straight from a maths lecture, boring as hell. Kris was there too, I think. We were on different courses, but we both needed a maths module, so we ended up in the same class.

Cheese was there too, somehow ended up sitting between us because I was a bit late. That meant if we wanted to chat rather than listening to Grimauld drone on and on about partial differentials we'd have to talk across him. It wasn't such a bad thing, Cheese can be a bit of a jerk when there's girls around, but he was okay on his own, you know? Aside from always calling us losers. But anyway, when I got in they were already talking about the Box. Somebody had heard something from somebody, we were going to be the next society to get in charge of Mr Hook's Big Black Box. I didn't catch half the conversation, the way the lecture theatre is set up it's hard to talk to more than one person. But I heard that apparently one of the sports or social societies gets this box every year, and they have to look after it.

I thought that's pretty weird. I mean, who wouldn't? I'd never even heard of the box before, nor had a friend in a society that had it. But Cheese said he thought it was something to do with the Societies Steering Group constitution. That kind of made sense, the kind of clause you'd put in a contract to prove that people are voting it in without reading it. A society every year has to look after this box and keep it safe, and once something like that is in the constitution it would take a majority vote at the AGM to negate it, so it gains the status of a tradition. Kris had heard something different, like the Box was a condition of a bequest. Mr Hook had left a fortune to the college, as long as they keep on passing this thing around. But either way, it's a weird enough story, and I couldn't wait to see the thing.

I hurried out of the lecture. I knew Kris would be right behind me, and we'd see each other in a few minutes anyway. But I was closer to the door and had my notebook back in my bag first, so he got the dubious honour of dissuading Cheese from his plan to keep on bugging Monty to date him. I would normally have gone to the Salad Bar for a burger before heading to the club room, that was my Tuesday evening routine. But I was so curious about this box that we were supposed to keep safe, and I wanted it to go down in the club's journal that I was the first one to see it. I didn't know why it mattered, but it seemed to.

I half jogged along Chancellor's Way as far as the South Quad, and then up the grass verge to get to the Mendeleev Building. I was almost out of breath when I got to the doors, but I knew I was there before Kris. I'd been thinking about sprinting up the stairs, getting there as fast as possible so I'd be arriving all cool and out of breath; it happened in a couple of the anime I'd been watching that season, like a way for the male lead to show that they're fit and that they put the most effort into even the smallest goals. But I didn't know if I could make it all the way up, I was so tired after just a short jog. Seriously, I have no idea how Marco and Ferrari can push themselves so hard and still talk afterwards. Like different rules apply for sporty types.

Anyway, I stumbled into the elevator and leaned against the wall, avoiding the mess of gum stuck to the left of the buttons. I tapped the top button; it had a sticky label stuck beside it printed with the words 'Sports and Communal Activities (socs)', but someone had rubbed it hard enough that the original engraved 'ROOF' beneath was visible. My eyes roved up and down the walls, while the rest of my body kept quite still. There were some new posters in here, there always were. I heard once the elevator originally had mirrors on the walls, some time in the seventies, but they were long gone before I even came to college. Now they were bare chipboard or something, with lists of second hand books for sale or people seeking flatmates for the next year pinned up haphazardly. They'd be taken down by next week, and then a new crop would appear.