Bronte's Inferno XIII (Sharon with a 'C')

I knelt on the lounge floor beside the soggy box, still out of breath from carrying it in. I heaved it the other way up. It hadn’t looked so heavy. No wonder Andrej Warhola had left it on the ground. And now, soggy-side up, the cardboard was drying before my eyes. There was no heating on in the house. It was too expensive, that was why I was still wearing the coat I’d worn to the meeting with Enoch. It was cashmere, and still had the scratchcard in the secret pocket that the people in the charity shop hadn’t found. Maybe I’d check it one day, but while it was still in your pocket it could still make you rich. Once you’d scratched the paper film away, it was just so much cardboard.

The box's cardboard was stout, sturdily old fashioned. It wasn’t marked fragile. As a matter of fact it wasn’t marked at all. No address, nothing. The tape on the box was old. It looked as though it had dried out in the way that cellulose tape does, but I tugged at a ragged edge and nothing happened except a flake of dried tape fell onto the carpet. The box remained firmly shut. I fetched my Swiss-Army knife from the office upstairs. Then I ran the longest blade along the centre of the tape holding the top – or bottom – of the box closed. It was like running the blade through sand, no sooner had the tape parted than it closed behind the blade. I brought the point of the blade down as hard as I could on the cardboard, jerked it out and the cardboard regenerated like a sea-cucumber’s gonad.

Just then the mobile beeped like a 50’s sci-fi robot. I fished it out of a pocket, there was a message, of course. It read,

‘Told you not to open it until after.’

I pushed the box to a corner of the room and put the waste-basket on top. Then I collapsed into the sofa picking up my battered copy of “Earth Stopped”, on the way. There wasn’t anything Arthurian about it and the prose was 1930’s dull, which was why I had been reading it for a month. Besides, it was about world devastation after a disaster, and who needed that? Before I knew it I was asleep and dreaming I was an ant.

The doorbell went just as Merlin was changing me into a badger. I dragged myself to the door, stuporous as an airman on a night shift.

It would be a lie, if I claimed to be expecting a peaked-capped chauffeuse standing outside the front door, much less the Rolls she had parked, blocking the whole of Consort Street. I was at a loss as to how she had manouvred down the narrow thoroughfare, between all the cars that never seemed to go anywhere. She said her name was Sharon with a ‘C’, and that Charnel House had sent her.

I told her I didn’t have an obol on me.