Chapter 104

"'I love you' is the inscription on Pandora's box."
-Mason Cooley
***
The first thing that surprised Taph about her buyer was how little he actually seemed to care about the box now that it was finally his.
In fact, when she put the canvas bag holding it on the table he leaned back, like he'd caught a whiff of something unpleasant—so far back that briefly he took himself out of the dim pool of light over their booth in the bar, leaving his face a shadow mask and his expression a mystery.
He was a young man, probably about Taph's age, dark and curly haired and dressed in expensive clothes, but in a sloppy way that showed he wasn't used to them. His name was John Callum. It had taken him almost a week to talk Taph into coming to meet him here, and now that she finally had he looked as if he was in the last place he wanted to be in the whole world.
It was late, but the bar was mostly empty. It was neither ritzy enough to impress the moneyed crowd nor dumpy enough for those who enjoyed dives—a middle-strata kind of place that stayed in business by catering to crowds that couldn't get in anywhere else. Callum apparently owned it.
Taph often drank, but she never went to bars anymore. Still, she knew what things were worth, and she sized the place up almost immediately. Callum, on the other hand, proved harder to place.
Most of the auction items she'd sent to their respective buyers via courier. Others, international mail. This was the only delivery Taph was making in person, and only because Callum offered a lot of money on top of his bid if she agreed to bring the box to him herself. Enough money to override her better judgment, at least for an hour.
She assumed that if a man insisted on meeting her it was because he wanted to make a pass, and everything about the setup—the bar, Callum's clothes, and his apparent anxiety included—said she was right. But no, she quickly realized, he had something else on his mind, although just what she couldn't say. Intrigued, she sipped her drink and let him do the talking.
The crescents of Callum's fingernails matched the shining ice cubes in his glass. He cleared his throat and said, "So that's it?" His real voice sounded exactly like his phone voice, and older than he appeared to really be.
"That's it," Taph said, patting the sack. "Want to see it?"
"No," said Callum, sliding back in his seat again.
"You should really inspect the merchandise," Taph said, pausing to take such a minuscule sip from her drink that its level barely changed at all. "How do you know I brought you the real thing?"
"I know," was all Callum said. And then, suddenly: "Do you know what it is?"
"The auction catalog included all of its specs," Taph said.
"Yes," said Callum, not fooled, "I read them. But I'm asking you: Do you know what it is?"
Shrugging, Taph said, "Up until now, it's been a problem. Now it's your problem—or it will be as soon as we're done here. And before we say anything else, you really do need to look at it."
Before he could stop her, she took the box out of the bag. It was a little less than a foot to each side, made of aged brass, and the lid was sealed up all the way around with some old gunk that looked like wax but smelled faintly of other things--sulphur, and asafetida.
Scratched into the lid was an archaic design, a circle enclosing a sequence of lines—but it was impossible to make out in detail, so old was the material. There was no lock or latch, and as far as she could tell no way to open it.
That's all it was: a box that wouldn't open, no matter how hard Taph had tried. Whatever was inside it wasn't particularly heavy--Taph even wondered if maybe it was empty. But obviously whoever had closed it had wanted to make sure it stayed that way.
It was basically trash—only its obvious age convinced her to bother looking for a buyer at all, imagining that maybe the craftsmanship was valuable on its own. Callum's top-dollar purchase had astonished her. Now she tapped the beaten brass lid with the tip of a fingernail for emphasis.
"Satisfied?" she said.
"It's the real thing, if that's what you're asking me," said Callum.
"Mm. You want me to put it away?"


"Please."
She put the box on the seat next to her, under the lip of the table. Once it was out of sight, Callum appeared almost animated by its absence.
"It was your father's?" he said after a moment.
"Yes."
"You didn't get along with your father." Callum said.
The hairs stood up on the back of Taph's neck. "Who told you that?"
"Nobody, I just noticed the way you talk about his things. Most people are very sentimental about a late parent's possessions." He prodded an ice cube in his glass with the tip of one finger.
"Dad had particular ideas about my life. I did love him," she added, hoping that it didn't sound too defensive. "But we grew into very different people. Black and white opposites, actually."
"And when he died he left you with a material burden. People spend their entire lives accumulating things and then they all just become a problem for someone else. What do you do, if you don't mind me asking?"
"I'm in networking. I help people meet the right people. But between you and me, what I'd really like is to start a family."
"What's stopping you?"
"Gotta meet the right person first."
Even though the box was out of sight, it still encroached on their conversation. Taph even imagined herself pausing in the middle of the conversation to see if it had anything to add, and had to labor to keep from laughing out loud at the idea.
Of all the things in her father's collection, the box was the one she thought she'd have the hardest time selling. After he died, Taph had been amazed and dismayed to discover that she'd inherited everything from Dad, whole rooms full of antique nonsense that he'd compiled over decades upon decades: knives, swords, staffs, animal skins, weird clothes, headdresses, rings, incense, perfume, books and loose pages in languages nobody knew, sealed jars and little bottles full of who knows what, and even stranger things that defied easy descriptions.
Much of it she'd seen before, of course, as he built the collection over her entire life, first out of pieces from his antiques business and then, later, as a regular customer of younger dealers now running similar businesses of their own.
Taph had chided him about wasting his money—one of the many things they fought about in his later years. He always said he didn't expect her to understand, and on that much at least they agreed, as she never had.
Not until the collection was hers did she realize just how big it really was—and how strange. So many things he'd never hinted at: bronze tripods, mummified hands, things preserved in jars and in wax, fossils and bones—weird shit.
After a while she'd begun resenting Dad's Weird Shit Room and its presence in her life, much the same way she'd resented him. But at least the Weird Shit did prove useful in the end; when she'd put a few of the showier items up in a blind auction, all of them sold for tidy sums. The auction house asked her for more, and when she provided more it all sold too.
Eventually she cut out the middleman and began running auctions herself. She imagined her customers must be incredible suckers, but they were suckers with money.
The box was the last of it, and Callum had been her only bidder. He struck her as maybe a young Silicon Valley type, only recently rich and not acquainted with either money or other people. He'd asked to meet at his bar not to show off that he owned it, she realized, but because it was a place he was already familiar with, a home field where he didn't have to worry about any extra variables.
As if reading her mind, he talked about the bar a bit. "I have no business partners, and no debts on the place. It was bleeding cash when I first took it over, but these days it's doing well." He was talking about business not to brag because that also made him comfortable, a topic he could speak on with confidence to mask his anxiety.
"That's great," Taph said, not even bothering to hide her disinterest. "Now about the item—"
"This is about the item," Callum continued. "I'm saying this place is an asset, and it's good value. If you wanted, I could give it to you—or someplace just like it. I'd sign the whole thing over, business and building, just say the word."
Taph waited for the punchline. It didn't come. Trying hard not to bat an eye she said, "Why would you do that? You've already paid me what you owe, for the item and for delivery. And I'm not interested in owning a bar."
"What would interest you: stocks? Patents? More antiques? I know every dealer, if there's something you've been looking for?"
"All I'm looking is for you to take your shit and go," Taph said.
But she didn't mean it—not entirely. John Callum was freaking her out, but he was also making her curious. If this was a come-on it was the damn strangest one in history. If it wasn't, then she couldn't imagine what he was up to.
He scooted around the perimeter of the table, closer to her; she realized he was trying to get close enough to lower his voice without leaning over and getting closer to the sack and its contents. Intrigued, she leaned closer to accommodate him.
"I paid to buy the box, and now I've paid you to bring it here. So now that's done."
"Get on with it," Taph said. She'd begun drinking faster in response to his dawdling, as if she could somehow speed up time this way.
"I'm proposing a third transaction: Now, tonight, I'll pay you just as much as I did to buy the box, as long as you agree—"
He paused and picked his dry lips, and Taph could not shake the feeling he was doing it entirely for dramatic effect.
Finally he spit out: "To destroy it. As soon as possible. In exactly the way I tell you to, with no questions asked."
Taph blinked again. Callum stared at her with deadly earnestness, his light brown eyes giving away nothing.
"I'm sorry, I must not have heard you right over the music," she said, swallowing the rest of her wine in one go. "Did you say—"
"Destroy the box. Say you'll do it, and I'll pay you tonight, in cash. Or do you want the bar after all? It's yours—but only if we do this."
"Destroy the box?" Taph repeated, as if trying the phrase out.
"I said no questions asked."
"Well I'm sorry, but I DO have questions. You paid for this—"
"And now I'll pay it again to be rid of it."
"You don't need me for something like that. Throw it off the bridge on your way home."
"Then it would just be lost," Callum said. "Not destroyed."
"So chuck it in the furnace. Run it over. Hell, you can get creative with this, make a fun weekend project or something. You don't need me." Grabbing her purse, Taph half rose out of the booth, suddenly eager to be out of whatever this was. Only the look in Callum's eyes—alarmed, vulnerable, pleading—stopped her.
"That wouldn't work either," he said. "I realize how this must sound, but there are very particular things that have to be done for this. If it's not done just the right way...well, it NEEDS to be done the right way. Surely you can understand that at least?"