Read Online The Box by Brian Harmon - Free Book Online Page B

What did he want to find? What kind of question was that? Did it really matter what they found?
    Brandy stood and watched him for a moment while she smoked, waiting for his answer.
    “I don’t know,” he said again.
    “Really?” She continued to watch him for a moment. Albert watched her watch him, unsure of what else to say. He’d already told her he didn’t know. Finally, she looked off down the darkened tunnel as if daydreaming and said, “I think it would be awesome if we found a lost vault. Maybe a gangster’s hideout.” She turned her brilliant eyes back to him. “Someone like Al Capone, you know.” She looked down at her cigarette and was silent for a moment as she pondered the thought. “Imagine a cramped little room with a gas lantern on a table and a stack of stolen money from a bank heist.” She looked up at him again and the youthful fascination in her eyes was mesmerizing. “Maybe even a bottle of scotch and a half-full glass. Someplace they thought they were coming back to but never did. Maybe someplace they were the morning before the police finally caught up with them. You know what I’m saying?”
    Albert nodded. “I think I do.”
    “It probably sounds stupid, doesn’t it?”
    “Not at all.” It was the truth. There was something very sweet in her ability to imagine such a thing. It was far fetched as all hell, of course. To begin with, somebody sent them the map to get them here. Why would they pass the credit for such an incredible discovery to them? But there was no doubt in his mind that such a place could exist. A mobster gunned down in a police standoff would undoubtedly leave many secrets untold, but for something like that to exist here of all places…
    But then again, why not?
    “But you don’t have any idea at all what you want to find?”
    “I guess not. I mean, it’s not so much what we find as that we find something at all, you know? It’s like the way I wanted to solve the puzzles on the box. It wasn’t what I expected to find, it was that I could find it.”
    He stood there a moment, considering what he’d just said. “For me, it’s not really where I’m going as how I get there. Does that sound lame?”
    Brandy smiled. “No. Not at all. I think maybe you’ve just got your priorities straight.”
    Albert shrugged. “I guess I’m not really all that imaginative. I tend to look at the world logically. Mathematically, I guess.”
    “I don’t know. I think it takes a good amount of imagination to solve puzzles like you do.”
    “Maybe. I don’t know.”
    They began to walk again.
    After a moment Albert said, “I think I’d value knowledge more than treasure. I’d love to uncover a secret.”
    Brandy smiled. “Like an eighty-year-old gangster hideout?”
    Albert laughed. “Yeah. Just like that.”
    They continued forward and soon they were distracted by a loud buzzing noise from somewhere ahead. Albert recognized the sound at once. Flies. Lots of them. A tunnel branched off to the right ahead of them and the noise intensified as they approached it.
    “Tell me we’re not going that way.”
    Albert looked down at the map. “No. We go straight.”
    “Good.”
    As they passed, Albert caught a brief, overwhelming whiff of decomposing flesh. Rat , he thought, pushing forward. Rats lived in places like these and they must die somewhere. But once the tunnel was behind him and the buzzing noise was fading, he wondered if he should have stopped to check the carcass. He remembered what Brandy told him the other day about students disappearing over the years. They could have received a mysterious box, too . Her words were humbling at the time and now he found them chilling. Suddenly it was far too easy to imagine that the rotting, maggot-ridden thing he left unseen in the darkness was a human corpse. What if she had been right about the sender of the box having malicious intentions and he just missed their only warning?
    That’s stupid . And yet, there was no