Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Ferrari Delguessimo: The Box

"What's this, then?" I asked as I turned around, feeling fully dressed now, "Got a new toy?" I looked the crate over. The first thing I noticed was that it was unlikely to be some kind of equipment for the society, because I was the treasurer at that point and I hadn't signed off on any large purchases. Then again, it wouldn't have surprised me if Dwayne had bought something himself and then decided here would be a good place to display it. Monty either, for that matter, she was great for unpredictable impulses.

I had a few guesses what it might be, from looking at the shape and size. A little larger than man size, so inside the packaging I wondered if it was something like a suit of samurai armour; either a historic item or a modern replica. More likely some allegedly-historical piece that had turned up on eBay after an attic sale, that would turn out to be worthless in the end but would still be treated like a hard-won treasure by my friends. Exactly the kind of thing that they'd buy without thinking, that I'd veto if they asked for club funds towards it, but that would turn into some kind of treasured memory as we worked out what to do with it regardless of its intrinsic value.

Or maybe it was a mannequin of some kind. To display armour, or to be dressed up as a samurai for a historic display. Something to make it easier for them to convince me to let them buy armour. Or, given that a good part of Dwayne's interest was through the appearance of samurai in video games, I couldn't quite discount the possibility that he'd found a broken arcade machine on the Internet and thought he could fix it up; or had persuaded Monty that we could afford to get one second hand for the club room.

I had a few guesses, but there was no doubt that whatever they had bought would end up being the source of memories. I couldn't think of a single boring thing that could be shipped inside a crate just large enough to contain a person. But then on thinking of shipping, I looked across the box for dispatch or customs labels. There were the worn remains of some stamps in one corner, but they were old and faded. The last bits of ink or stickiness that had survived years of handling. That made me even more curious. I couldn't believe that these guys had removed the stickers and shipping manifests from a new purchase before opening the crate, which meant this hadn't been shipped by any major courier. It must have come from within the university, from another society or possibly an academic department. I couldn't think of anyone who'd have something that interested these guys, so I was starting to lean towards the belief that the man-sized box did actually contain a person. We'd open it, then some practical joker from the Athletics Team or Hellenic Students Fraternity would leap out and give us a heart attack. I wondered if the others had formed the same opinion.

"Mister Hook's Big Black Box," Kris enunciated carefully. Perfect received pronunciation, you'd never guess he wasn't a native English speaker unless you could leap to conclusions from the fact he spoke like he'd learned it from a textbook. I took a sharp breath at that name; I was in enough different societies that it was likely one of them would come into possession of the Box sooner or later. But somehow, I'd never expected it to be the LUSARS. Then again, looking after the Box would probably fit in with their club activities as well as any of the other hare-brained schemes that Dwayne and Marco cooked up.

"Okay," Kris flipped through some sheets of paper, "I'll let Dwayne walk through these notes later. But it seems this Box is Mister Hook's Big Black Box, although I see that it is not black, and whether it is big is surely a matter of personal taste. It has been left in the care of the Lanchester University administration by a foreign benefactor, and the condition is that this Box is passed between different societies. We must store the box safely until we are informed to pass it to a different group. It must not be left exposed to the weather, frozen, damp, or a few other things. And most importantly we must not seek to open the Box or to allow any other society to open it while we are its custodians. If the Box is opened we could possibly lose funding or other strictures which are quite difficult to comprehend in the technical language of the document. I think it will probably be safer to avoid opening the Box until we can understand what the possible punishments are."