The Box Read Online Free PDF

television. Besides, right now he wanted to be alone with his thoughts.
    He walked to the far end of the hallway, descended the stairs and then exited the building through the back doors. He did not have any particular destination in mind. He merely wanted to take a walk, but he’d barely reached the steps when he remembered that he had not yet eaten dinner.
    He crossed the street, climbed the steps of the University Center and then made his way downstairs to the cafeteria. This was where he’d eaten every meal since his arrival at Lumey. There was a larger cafeteria over in the Cube, where he’d been told the selection was far greater, but so far he’d seen no reason to walk halfway across campus when he was not yet bored with the menu here.
    The dining area was pretty busy at this time of night, but it would be slowing down soon. Already the lines at the registers were beginning to shorten. Albert selected a cheeseburger, chips and a soda out of convenience—ham on a croissant from the sandwich shop would have been better, but he didn’t feel like relaying his order to the lady at the counter—and then sought out a relatively private table at the far end of the room.
    Often when he’d come here, the noise and the crowd would bother him, but tonight he actually enjoyed the atmosphere. Tonight, there was something very comforting about being alone in a room filled with people.
    He unwrapped his cheeseburger and took a bite. He didn’t feel terribly hungry. In fact, there was an unpleasant warmth in his belly, a sick sort of knot. He told himself he was merely tired, his mind overworked from trying to solve the riddles of the box all day, but he knew the feeling was mostly to do with Brandy.
    That she could just walk away like that… How could she not want to know? How could she just leave and go about her life like nothing happened? He supposed she only did the responsible thing. Perhaps he was nothing more than a fool for thinking such a ridiculous box deserved such obsession, but he couldn’t help it. The box was simply too intriguing to pass up. It was a riddle. And he’d always loved a good riddle. It was his thing. It was what he was good at. He was smart like that.
    …Too smart to actually believe that this was really about any of that.
    It was simple disappointment.
    Still chewing his cheeseburger, he withdrew the key Brandy gave him from his jeans pocket and looked at it. It was so simple; just a perfectly flat piece of metal, less than an eight of an inch thick, with no grooves of any kind. Only the simple shape of the teeth on either side allowed it to open the box, and yet the box itself was so finely crafted, with such an elaborate locking mechanism. The two just didn’t seem to go together.
    Sort of like he and Brandy, he supposed. But for just a few minutes…
    A loud outburst from a few tables over drew him from his thoughts. He glanced over and surveyed the five people sitting there—two young men, three girls, all about the same age, perhaps a year ahead of him—and then turned his eyes back to his dinner.
    He focused his concentration onto the key itself and began to review the things he’d found inside the box. The feather. The broken, rusted blade. The brass button. The silver pocket watch. The stone. What did they all mean? It all seemed like so much junk, but at the same time there was something else. There was something about them that tickled his brain, a strange sort of sense to be made from all the items in the box. It was a strange sort of sense in the simple fact that they made no sense. None of the things in the box fit together and that was exactly why the whole thing fit together. It was like a game, a tangled web of mysteries that each promised a key to solving the others. If someone meant it as a practical joke, they were good, and they knew him well enough to know that he’d be hooked. And this was precisely why he did not think that it was a practical joke.
    It was strange,