It was strange, the way this kept drawing him in. He felt continuously compelled to return to the box, as if some unseen force was pushing him along, encouraging him to see the answers.
Once he was finished eating, he picked up the backpack and placed it in his lap. He intended to reach inside and open the box so that he could take another look at the items within, but as he reached for it, he caught sight of the carved words on one of the sides.
“Help,” “Come Together” and “Yesterday.” He’d almost forgotten. According to Brandy, these were all songs by The Beatles. Maybe the items inside the box weren’t what he was supposed to gain from Brandy’s visit. Maybe it was this small bit of knowledge. But what did it mean?
“Three songs,” he muttered to himself, hardly aware that he was speaking aloud. Not just three songs, but three songs by the same group. That made it less likely to be a coincidence. If he’d been more into music, he might have made this connection as well, but he wasn’t very familiar with the music of The Beatles.
Songs. Singing. Music. He read the last line to himself several times, the one that Brandy had not recognized:
G N J
Albert stood up, slipped the backpack over his shoulders and walked away from the table. He no longer noticed the people around him. He threw away his garbage on his way out of the cafeteria and then climbed the stairs and left the building heading south across campus. The three song titles circled again and again through his thoughts. Music. Perhaps it was a long shot, but just maybe whoever carved those song titles into the box was referring to the university’s music building.
The music building was on the other side of campus, next to the field house. Albert made his way south on Third Street, then west on Pole Street, which passed by the Cube. The Cube was four identical eight-story dormitories built together in a square. This was the main dormitory on campus, where better than half of all the resident students lived. He passed the Cube, crossed Redwood Avenue and then left Pole heading south on a sidewalk that took him past the art building and the field house to the music building.
Albert walked around to the front, taking in his surroundings as he walked, and paused in front of the main doors. There was a large sign over the door, proclaiming the building as Juggers Hall. Until he arrived here, he hadn’t been able to remember the name of the music building.
Juggers.
He stepped through the front doors and found himself in an empty lobby. His hunch was growing into something more certain and he was able to find what he was looking for immediately. On one of the walls, hanging over a row of chairs that looked soft and cozy, but probably weren’t, was a large portrait of a balding, silver-haired gentleman in an expensive suit. He wore a thick mustache and an air of kind authority. Beneath the portrait, on an engraved plate, was the name Dr. George Nicholas Juggers.
George Nicholas Juggers.
G. N. J.
He’d found it.
He sat down beneath George Nicholas Juggers—his hunch about the coziness of the chairs was correct—and opened his backpack. “Help,” “Come Together” and “Yesterday” were song titles, and the GNJ referred to this building. Albert turned the box in his hands. First Brandy. He’d shown the box to Brandy and when Brandy found the key, she brought it to him. More important than the key, however, was that she’d brought him the answer to the second clue. Songs. He’d made the connection between song titles and music and followed his instincts to the music building, where he was rewarded with the third clue. Now he knew where to look. And what he was looking for were those last three lines. An I and a Z—or was it a one and a Z? The second line still looked like a roman numeral seven, but there was no way of knowing for sure. And the last line could’ve been anything.
He stood up and looked around the room. There were soda machines against the wall and an elevator machine room in one corner, two tables and about a dozen of those falsely cozy chairs, but there was nothing that appeared to match any of the markings on the box. He spent several minutes pacing around the room, examining everything, but there was nothing there.
His first thought was that the songs narrowed it down to the building and the initials narrowed it down to the room, but maybe the initials were just another part of the previous clue. He set off down the hallway, peering into any rooms that were open or that offered windows through which he could see. He took the stairs up to the second and then third floor and then took the elevator down to the basement.
Nothing.
Eventually he found his way around to the back of the building and he stepped outside. Perhaps the next day he would tell Brandy what he’d found and she could help him determine what the last clues meant. Already the janitors who were vacuuming the carpets up on the third floor were beginning to give him strange looks. He could hardly blame them. He was creeping around like a thief looking for something to steal, cradling a strange wooden box in his arms. He’d be lucky if they didn’t call campus security on him.
He was about to walk back into the building for one last look around when something caught his eye.
No, that wasn’t right. It didn’t catch his eye. It was as though something compelled him to turn and look back, as though a soft voice had whispered from that direction, begging him to turn and see.
For a moment he didn’t see anything, just the sidewalk, some trees, the billowing white smoke of the power plant beyond, the darkening sky above. There was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing he couldn’t see walking out of any other building. But then he saw it, right there in plain sight, yet well hidden. He’d walked past so many of them. They were all over campus. It was the panic button.
These big red buttons were attached to six-foot posts all over campus and wired directly to the campus security headquarters in the administration building. In the event of an emergency, one push of this button would bring the campus police rushing to this location.
There were dozens of these buttons on campus, but no two were exactly identical. They each displayed a different number above the button, identifying the station. This particular button was number twelve.
It wasn’t a Z at all. It was a number two. A one and a two. Twelve.
Albert felt certain that this was the first of the three clues on this final side of the box, but he felt neither excited nor proud to have found it. Instead, he suddenly felt very creepy. What made him turn and look at the panic button in the first place? It was as though something reached into his head and made him see it.
No. That was preposterous. He simply saw it immediately, registered it subconsciously and then reacted to it a moment later. That was all.
Still, something felt very weird. Perhaps it wasn’t right. He walked over to the button and examined it. Except for the number twelve and the warning sign that hung beneath it, there was nothing. He turned and looked around him, convinced that this was the wrong solution after all. But then he found the second clue staring down at him from the roof of Juggers Hall. A tower rose up from the center of the roof and a large clock-face stared back at him. On that clock face, directly between roman numerals six and eight, was the second clue.
Albert stared up at the clock, unable to believe what he saw. What he did next he did almost without thinking. Standing in front of the number twelve panic button, he stared up at the clock and traced a straight line with his eyes from the center of the clock, past the seven and down to the ground. There, set into the concrete was a large metal plate, an entrance to the tunnel that ran beneath the sidewalk.
He walked over to this metal covering and found the final clue. Near one corner, a number was stamped into the metaclass="underline"
1005T
There was no way to know what that number meant, or how to read it. This particular chunk of metal could have been manufactured almost anywhere in the world. It could have been designed for anything and then salvaged and used here as a way to keep students from trespassing. But here it was, looking him in the face, the answer to the riddle of the box.