Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Marco Schmidt: The Box Unboxed

Dwayne headed off upstairs, and Kris handed his note to Ferrari. I guess he figured she's the most trustworthy. But that action made me sure right away that I could trust Kris. He wasn't allied with some other department, because then he wouldn't have been so eager to dash off to his lecture. I knew he was in trouble, probably almost as much as me, but if they were going to make his graduation depend on opening the Box, he would have every reason to prioritize that. I trusted Dwayne as well, but right in this case I couldn't be sure he wasn't working for another department. He was going to leave three of us alone with the Box, but going up to the plant room hadn't really been a choice, and in any case he could have trusted us not to touch it when we were together.

I mean, really, I trusted everyone. You were all nice guys, but there was a chance we had conflicting objectives, and right in that moment Kris was the only one I could be completely sure of.

I hurried out to my truck to fetch the trolley. I knew that left both the girls with the Box, but I wasn't worried too much about that. Monty, I didn't think she ever had it in her to lie to us. Not to mention, she'd been alone in a room with the Box before and all she'd done was talk to it like some child's imaginary friend. Ferrari was probably the one I'd be most scared of if she did have a secret plan, because she had so many talents that would be actually useful for a stealth Box-stealing ninja. But I didn't have any signs that I couldn't trust her, and she'd seemed like the voice of reason in most of our discussions so far. Not to mention that she couldn't do anything with Monty there, she couldn't be that ruthless. Maybe she could secretly open the Box and just hope Monty didn't notice, but the odds on that working were no better than fifty-fifty at most; not something a scheming antihero would gamble on.

I was approaching the bottom of the elevator just as the door slid open and the Box fell out with a crash. In a second my heart was pounding and I was running the last thirty yards towards the destruction, panicking both over the Box and my friend.

"Are you okay?" I yelled as I got closer, in my panic not paying enough attention to determine who was still standing there.

"I'm fine," Ferrari grabbed my arm, trying to get me to stand still, "The Box slipped, but I think..." and then her words trailed off into silence. Monty came running up from another corridor as we stood and stared, and I could only guess that she'd decided to take the stairs rather than ride with Ferrari and the Box.

"Wow," she whispered, "That's kind of scary."

"I wasn't expecting the whole steampunk aesthetic," Ferrari was probably trying to make it sound normal, to take our minds off what we were actually seeing. For me at least, it wasn't working.

The fall had caused the crate to burst open. Maybe my efforts to open it without the right tools had stressed the joints, or maybe it was already battered from having been passed around between so many different groups. Maybe it was just because it had somehow been leaning against the doors when they opened, and a heavy box fell hard against the tiled floor.

We hadn't lost the competition, though. We hadn't violated the terms, I had to believe that because otherwise my academic life was over. And I could just about believe it, because the thing inside the crate could possibly be described as a Box, though that isn't the word I would normally use.

It was almost the same size as the crate it had been packed in, which could have been built around it. Certainly, the scraps of cheap pine had been shaped so that the Box itself wouldn't rattle around or move within the crate. It wasn't quite cuboidal, being noticeably narrower at the top and bottom, and it looked like there had been timber battens inside the crate at regular intervals, steadily wider to ensure a snug fit. But even within its overall box shape, there were a dozen different pieces of metal, jointed and overlaid in an incredibly complex pattern.

It was also not black, despite being described to us as Mr Hook's Big Black Box. It was dark metal, with a faint red tint where the light caught it. It looked blacker than the crate had been, at any rate. It was highly polished, like the surface of a car whose owner took every care to ensure the finish was absolutely perfect. It was made up of at least thirty plates, some curved slightly and some with angles in around the edges, but it gave the impression more of a machine, or a bizarrely complex clock, than a passive Box. I think it was like four or five concentric boxes, but every one with parts missing to let you see the one beneath. Each made of metal plates a sixteenth of an inch thick, and with just the edges of gears visible between as I paced around to look at it from different angles.

The outer layer wasn't plain, but embossed with some kind of design. At first I thought it was just an abstract pattern of lines, like the tribal style tattoos that were so popular at the time, but then I saw the face, and the letters, and my whole perception of the thing shifted. It was hard to make out the words, but easy to guess that they spelled out a warning. If the psychology students had made this to test students of future generations, if this was indeed part of their experiment, then I supposed they wanted to see if fear would deter people who might otherwise have considered opening it. The whole design, steampunk or gothic or whatever you called it, was almost terrifying. It was inviting though, too, in its way. It made you curious what might be inside such a strange package. And the key protruding from the heart, with its head still wedged protectively between two pieces of the outer crate, was almost an open invitation.

My subconscious still didn't want to call it the Box, though. When I looked at that shape, regardless of the outlandish styling, there was only one word that came to mind. It was clockwork, it was polished metal. It had joints and moving parts like a puzzle box or a transforming action figure, and there was a key sticking out near the centre, and it had engravings and patterns on the surface that must have taken an artist weeks. But none of those things could disguise its basic shape.

It was a coffin.