The box was mounted directly to one of the foundation walls, about twelve feet from the entrance. It wasn’t an electrical junction box I’d ever seen before. There was no label, no breaker, and no connection to anything inside the house. The plumber wiped the dust off the front and found a small keyhole underneath the cover. He looked at me and asked whether I had ever seen it before. I told him no, and he said the wiring leading to it was newer than the house but old enough that whoever installed it had done a very careful job of hiding where it came from.
I went upstairs and brought back the toolbox I’d inherited from the previous owner because I thought there might be a key inside. There wasn’t one, but there was a tiny brass key taped beneath the bottom tray. I had owned that toolbox for twenty years and had never noticed it. The plumber tried it in the lock, and it opened immediately. Inside the box was a second, much smaller compartment containing a folded sheet of paper, two photographs, and a cassette tape in a plastic case. The paper had one sentence written across it: “Do not connect this to the house.”
I asked the plumber whether he knew what kind of system it could have been connected to, and he said the wire looked like it had once carried power to something outside the normal electrical system. We followed it along the foundation until it disappeared behind a section of concrete that had clearly been repaired years after the house was built. I remembered that the previous owner had told me the crawlspace had flooded badly in the early nineties, but I’d never thought anything of it. When I looked at the photographs, I realized they had been taken in that same crawlspace before the repair.
The first showed the room completely empty except for a wooden chair and the box we’d just opened. The second showed the chair from a different angle, with someone sitting in it. I couldn’t see the person’s face, but there was a date written on the back that was almost thirty years old. The plumber told me he wanted no part of whatever we’d found and started packing his tools. I put the cassette into an old player that still worked, and after several seconds of static, a man’s voice came through. He said my name, then paused and added, “If you’re hearing this, it means the people who put the box here never came back for it.”
