Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Act II«Infirmary»

Saint Jude's Infirmary and Hospice looked like an old building, but wasn't anywhere near as historic as it looked. In actual fact, it was fewer than thirty years old, but it had been constructed to mirror the architectural style of the adjoining convent, which was much, much older. It had been a condition of developing that land, or somesuch restriction, that the new building didn't stand out.

Destinee Darwin walked slowly up to the door, placing one foot in front of the other so as to only leave a single line of footprints across the complex curved pattern that some groundskeeper must spend hours raking the gravel path into each morning. Kris was with her this time. He knew that this was one appointment he should never miss if he was actually in the country, and was more than a little ashamed to realise the number of times he had made some excuse to be elsewhere over the last couple of years.

"Ah, Miss Darwin," one of the nurses smiled as she came in, and bowed slightly. The place was on land rented from the convent, and was partly run and partly owned by them. So the was a good chance this woman was actually a nun or novice, just in a different uniform. Still, it never felt right to ask about something like that. Destinee just smiled at the irony inherent in the situation. "Here to see your sister?"

Destinee just nodded. The issue of family was often a complex one, that came with far more obligations than the elder Mrs Darwin would ever realise. Today, Destinee was here to see her sister. A girl whose parents denied her existence, because she was dead to them. She'd come to Lanchester on a whim fifteen years before, and tried to help Destinee with a problem without ever thinking about the consequences. They'd got caught up in more chaos than anyone could be expected to handle. The doctors said they were hopeful, they always did, but Destinee didn't think she had much chance of chatting normally to her sister now.

She had a private room, of course. Mrs Darwin hadn't been prepared to pay the additional costs, but Destinee had thought it was the least she could do. A safe, private space for the sister who had almost literally taken a bullet for her.

The room was quite spacious, with a high vaulted window looking out onto the grounds of the convent opposite. There was a Bible on the window ledge, although it was unlikely anyone besides the nurses would have any interest in it. The walls were bare, white plaster. From the inside, this could have been a room in any building of the '80s, or in some construction of prefab modules, until you looked at the windows and their stone surround. It was a distinctive clash of styles, that probably wasn't seen in any other hospital in the world. That was one of the reasons they had chosen this place.

The sign outside the door had an orange sticky label on it today. She wasn't conscious, but that was nothing unusual. Destinee would come here every few months in any case, talking to a perfectly still figure in a bed. She didn't know if any of her words got through, but she just had to hope. Sharing her life made her feel better, anyway.

Today at she wouldn't be sitting alone, telling stories to a silent figure. There was a wooden folding chair in front of the window, and Dwayne Carlisle was sitting there, reading the story of his stroke of genius, the defining moment of his life so far. He hesitated when Destinee came in, blushing just a little.

"You made it then?" She flashed a smile, "I noticed when you had your phone out, you were making an appointment the same morning as in my calendar."

"We all spotted it," Destinee spun around, surprised by a voice just behind her. Marco was there too, sitting almost opposite Dwayne so that the door had prevented Destinee seeing him right away. There was an empty chair beside him with a scarf draped over the back.

"What do you mean, 'we'?" Ferrari asked sarcastically, re-entering the room with a steaming mug of coffee provided by one of the nurses, "You wouldn't even have been here if I hadn't called to remind you."

"Well, Dwayne figured it out," he answered, "And you. That's enough to get all of us together. And it is all of us, this time."

"Well then, this is almost a LUSARS meeting," Destinee grinned, even wider than usual. "Does that mean Ferrari's in charge again?"

"Sure. But I don't know what's going on, still. We were up to the bit where you left the Box in a field, and somehow the CIA's best quick search specialists couldn't find it. I want to know how that was done, because if there's some trick that can hide a Box like that from their equipment, there'll be quite a reward for figuring it out."

"Maybe this'll help," Destinee opened one of the sketchbooks from her bag, while Kris went to find chairs for both of them. The picture was more abstract than many of her creations. It showed a girl floating in space, eyes open but glazed. She was wearing a simple white outfit, that could have been a bridesmaid's dress from some ceremony that didn't like so many frills. The back of the dress was soaked, as if the girl was half floating in water and half in air. In front of her was a window, or a portal, in the shape of a coffin. There were indistinct shapes beyond it, maybe some men fighting as seen through frosted glass. The window seemed to be in a wall made of zigzag lines, that Monty had put a lot of effort into detailing. They could have been some arbitrary geometric pattern, but the edges were too rough. As if the zigzags were engraved in stone, or pressed into thick mud. It was amazing how much detail and realism simple pencil lines could convey.

"It's something symbolic," Ferrari stared at the image, "I never really wondered what half your pictures meant, and I don't think I've seen this one before. Does it really describe how they hid the Box?"

"Come on guys," Kris joined the conversation as he sat down, "We're all friends here. Even after we tried to betray each other. You can tell us, please? I've been trying to work out how you got the Box out of the van, and I can't see how you did it."

"It's not that heavy," Marco smiled, "I can lift one end of it easy enough, move it outside the door, and then the weight of the Box carries it the rest of the way. Only need two fit people if you're carrying it more than a few feet."

"But the Box wasn't next to the van," Kris continued trying to unravel the same line of reasoning, even though he knew he must be on the wrong track. "The spooks would have found it for sure."

"How about we just let Dwayne tell the story?" Ferrari offered, "I'm sure he's dying to boast about his amazing idea. And I'm just as eager to see if I interpret this picture correctly."