Amy was still groggy. From what she could tell, she was laying on something soft, but firm. It felt like velvet to the touch, yet it must have been stretched over a hard surface and thinly padded. And it was dark. Even through partially open eyes she could see nothing of her surroundings.
Amy Brant was the best field reporter the newsroom had to offer. If anyone could search out a story, she could. She was the best simply because she cared the most to be the best. She would go to any lengths to uncover the truth if there was indeed a truth to uncover. The proof of that commitment lay in the position she now found herself.
Her senses were beginning to focus. The velvet touched her arms and her legs. More precisely she felt it caress her shoulders and the backs of her thighs. It brushed the sides of her arms as she shifted her elbows. That began to register in her mind as something not quite right. Some facet of that simple touch seemed altogether wrong. It startled her most to realize her thighs were bare.
She was on the trail of a story, tracking down what could only properly be called an urban myth. Pandora's Box. People had heard of it for some time. The city was rampant with rumors and half-bitten tales of unholy debauchery. Some said they knew it was real, some that it was no more than a fanciful fabrication. Everyone wanted to know the truth, but not a one seemed capable of finding it. Those that claimed certainty offered no proof. Others that proposed it a lie, delivered nothing to substantiate their view. There was no way of telling for sure, one way or the other. No way until now.
She should have been dressed. She knew that. She should have had on her jacket, a blouse, a snug pair of jeans. She remembered clearly getting into them before she went out. She had surveyed herself in the mirror, checking her dark lashes and red lips to ensure that her smile was disarming. She had bobbed the blond curls of her hair to maximize her innocence. The jacket and jeans had been selected to minimize threat. She didn't want to drive anyone away that might have useful information.
The underbelly of the city protected it, nurtured it, kept it secret and safe. The Box had to be hidden in order to survive. At least that is what the believers believed. The others merely suggested that such secrecy only proved it to be false. The deception was masked by very inability to prove itself true. No one had the answers. No one. But Amy never accepted that for an answer. Someone had to know. Someone had to have started the lie, or someone had to have been a part of the truth.
She lay still as she struggled to gather her wits. Her heart was beginning to pound in her chest. She was at least partially clothed, that much she could feel. A light shirt of some kind covered her chest. What felt like stockings perhaps graced most of her legs. Shoes were definitely strapped to her feet. Slim bracelets bound each wrist, linked them inseparably at her waist. With a few strong tugs she knew for sure her hands were cuffed together.
The phone call had surprised her, not by its content, but by its timing. She had almost given up. She had been scouring the city for weeks on end, asking from bar to bar, questioning club owners, shop clerks, and street hounds. She had graced the depths of every porno hut and adult video store she could find. She had conversations with prostitutes, pimps, junkies, and thugs. Everyone appeared to have a clue, but no one seemed to have any answers. Then the phone rang, one last time.
Her limbs were starting to tingle as feelings surged back into them. Her fingertips rested lightly over the slow rise and fall of her belly. The hem of her shirt did not lay much past the stretch of her hands. The recognition of smooth velvet on her naked cheeks alarmed her even more. With the exception of stockings and shoes, she was clearly naked below the waist. And the top left her arms bare, with only thin straps touch each shoulder. If anything, it must have been no more than a light camisole.
The call had been from a strange man. The voice clearly garbled by electronic manipulation. It sounded far more sinister than suspicious. The voice had told her where to be, when to be there. It gave her no chance to respond. It only told her the Box was waiting for her. It told her to come alone. Then it went dead.
She stretched out her other senses, tried to hear beyond the loud thumping of her heart. Her breathing sounded muffled. The air around her felt moist with her own panic. As she shifted slightly, she could tell that the velvet surrounded her on both sides as well. Lifting her hands, she discovered the lid of her confinement was only inches above her. Now she truly began to be afraid.
She wanted the story. More than she knew, she wanted to prove it for what it was. She wanted to expose the hoax, unearth the perpetrators of such a wild myth. And if it were not false, if the indescribable stories were in fact true, she wanted to be the one to reveal them to the world. But it was more than her reputation, that drove her. It went far deeper than her career or her fame. Some deep secret part of herself had to know if the things she had heard could actually happen in real life, to real people. To people as real as herself.
Straining her eyes open against the utter darkness, she discovered one more aspect of her imprisonment. The darkness came from more than being inside some form of container. A band of cloth covered her eyes, wrapped snugly around her head. She had been blindfolded and handcuffed, stripped naked and redressed in nothing more modest than lingerie. She wanted to scream, as panicked images flooded her brain. But fortunately, she remained far too afraid for that.
The limo had arrived just as the voice had told her it would. It was sleek and black, transmitting a richness of character altogether at odds with the desolate section of the city where she had been told to appear. It pulled up out of the dark into the yellow circle of streetlight like a chariot of foreboding . It parked across the street and waited on her, silent and knowing. It took her ten full minutes to muster up the courage to leave her own car and walk up to it.
In the confinement of darkness, Amy waited as all her senses came to life. Her heartbeat thudded in her chest while she panted on the edge of hysteria. There was enough air in the container, but it felt hot and stuffy. Her boy trembled as every nerve twitched into consciousness. She smelled her own sweat mingling with the velvet interior like a new form of incense.
The limousine stood patiently while she approached. Nothing else but her seemed to move along the darkened street. In the glow of streetlights, she could just make out the driver, but his dark hat and glasses offered her little to recognize. She tried to get his attention, but he seemed content to ignore her. The only sign that anyone in the vehicle cared for her presence at all came as the rear door opened. It drifted quietly on its hinges, and hovered open while she decided whether or not she really wanted to meet whoever was inside.
She thought about removing the blindfold, but her limbs appeared unwilling to respond. Her senses may have been alive, but her body remained numb. Perhaps it was the fear that gripped her. A thousand imagined possibilities awaited her now. She only knew from stories and rumors the horrors she might expect. She had wanted so desperately to unlock the secrets of the box. Now she was in it, she knew, for better or worse. And for all that it mattered, she had only herself to blame.
On the verge of whimpering, she had no choice but to recall how she had stepped into the open door of the limo. The interior had been dim, and she had seen no one initially as she came near. Only the driver appeared to have any substance at all. But she had gotten in anyway, expecting to encounter the man who had called her on the phone earlier that evening, the man who claimed to be capable of delivering the truth she sought. Once inside, however, she found herself alone.
Before she had made herself comfortable in the seat, the door had closed, swinging shut with the quiet hum and click of electronics. Then the car shifted forward smoothly, and she had no option but to fall back into the rear seat. "Hey," she had shouted towards the unseen driver, "Do you mind telling me where we are going?"
The interior was lit by a row of small lights along the ceiling which cast just enough glow for her to see the whole of the cabin. The driver was hidden behind a smooth black partition, and other than the rear bench, ther existed nothing but an open mini-bar and a small speaker console on the forward wall. Though the eat was soft and comfortable, the floor carpeted and clean, she felt as utterly trapped and helpless in the back of that limo as she did in the small black space in which she found herself now. And the words that came out of the speaker were as clear to her now as her own name.
"Amy Brant," the modulated voice crackled out at her, "why do you seek the Pandora's Box?"
Shocked by the unexpected sound as much as by the use of her own name, she stammered a moment. She was struggling for the correct answer. Some measure of the timbre in the electronic voice informed her that of all the people she had encountered, all the false leads and dead ends, this time she had found what she was looking for. The nature of this encounter was far too elaborate to be nothing. It was in keeping with the curious secrecy of the answers she sought. And that made her reply all the more important. She might make or break her own fate by the simplest twist of her words. For the first time in her career since she was an intern for the college paper, she found herself at a lost for words.
But the voice was not as patient as the limo had been. "Answer!" the speaker blared after a long moment.
