Part 2 — The Carved Words and the Long Shadow
The wind howled outside the window, driving fine snow crystals against the glass where they rattled like miniature, venomous darts. Elias stood completely paralyzed. His fingers, still clutching the cold edge of the grey box, trembled involuntarily. The sentence burned into his retina as if branded with a red-hot iron: Do not trust your son.
Why was this warning written in Dutch on a box handed to him during a snowstorm in Germany? His wife Anna was Dutch by birth. She hailed from a small coastal village near The Hague, and all the memories Elias had painstakingly buried deep in his heart surged to the surface with the force of an iceberg.
Elias breathed heavily. Julian. His only son. Julian was thirty years old, a successful architect living in Frankfurt. After Anna's death, they hadn't lost contact entirely, but their relationship had grown strangely distant, surrounded by an invisible wall of silence and unaddressed grief. Was it possible that Julian had something to do with that fatal car accident eight years ago?
No. It was absurd. Elias shook his head to dispel the poisonous thought. Julian loved his mother above all else. After the accident, he had been unresponsive for weeks, dropped out of his studies, and buried himself in work. How dare a strange woman—a woman he had helped at a freezing bus stop three years ago—suggest something so monstrous?
The grey box lay before him on the solid oak dining table. It was made of a peculiar, matte material. It felt neither like wood nor metal, but rather like an extremely dense, cold ceramic or synthetic stone. There was no lock, no hinge, no visible seam. Only a tiny, recessed slot at the bottom.
Elias sat down slowly. The woman's words echoed in his ears: “Do not open the box alone.”
But who was supposed to be with him? Julian? The very son the inscription explicitly warned him against? His thoughts raced out of control. If he forced the box open now, he might destroy the truth inside. If he left it closed, madness would consume him.
He stood up, walked to the kitchen cupboard, and pulled out a bottle of aged cognac. With a trembling hand, he poured himself a glass and downed it in one gulp. The burning sensation in his throat briefly calmed his mind. He looked at the photographs on the wall. There hung a picture from happier days: Anna, smiling on the beach of Scheveningen, the wind blowing her blonde hair across her face. Beside her stood little Julian, perhaps ten years old, building a sandcastle. They looked like the perfect, tight-knit family.
Yet appearances had been deceiving even then. Elias suddenly recalled the months preceding Anna's death. She had been nervous. She spent hours on the phone, hanging up immediately whenever Elias entered the room. Back then, he assumed she was planning an anniversary surprise or suffering early symptoms of depression. When the police knocked on his door that rainy November night to inform him that her car had gone off a cliff into an old quarry, his world shattered. They told him the brakes had failed. Tragic wear and tear. No third-party foul play.
A sudden knock tore him violently from his dark thoughts.
Elias gasped. The glass nearly fell flat onto the table. He checked the wall clock. It was shortly before midnight. Who could be at his door at this hour during a blizzard? The mysterious woman had just left, hadn't she? Or had she returned?
With a pounding heart, he stepped through the dark hallway and peeked through the peephole.
Outside, illuminated by the streetlamp, stood a tall figure in a heavy coat. Snow had dusted the person's shoulders. When the figure raised his head and looked at the door, Elias caught his breath.
It was Julian.
His son was standing uninvited at his door on Christmas Eve. He kept one hand in his coat pocket and stared up at the door with a strangely rigid, cold expression.
Elias felt the blood freeze in his veins. The words carved on the box burned in his mind once more: Do not trust your son.
He placed his hand on the doorknob, but hesitated. Should he open it? Why had Julian come here out of nowhere on Christmas Eve, after two years of radio silence? Did he know the woman was bringing the box?
Before Elias could unlock the door, the muted chime of a text message echoed from his mobile phone resting on the hallway sideboard. Elias took a step back and glanced at the lit screen.
It was an SMS from an unknown number. The message read: “Do not let him in. He is not looking for you. He is looking for the key in the box.”
Elias looked from the phone screen back to the peephole. Outside, Julian raised his hand and knocked again. Harder this time. And as he turned his head slightly, Elias saw what his son was concealing in his other hand.
It was a heavy, solid, three-sided key made of patinated brass.
