Email Pete

You can’t keep this box. You must tell the university. You could phone Pete, but speaking your crime is beyond you. What if you clammed up? What if he gets angry? No, send him an email.

It takes an hour of fretting over the right wording before you have your email admitting the mistake ready. It sits on the screen for several minutes before you finally hit send. Once that happens you feel relief.

Nothing happens. You half expected a knock on the door. No that’s ridiculous. Nobody works that quickly. Then your laptop pings. A response from Pete.

A response, but not the one you’re expecting. An out of office response. Pete is apparently now on holiday and won’t be reading his emails for a couple of weeks. If your request is urgent, please contact the department’s secretary. Well, you could do that, but you never liked her. She was always judging you. She was one of those who thought Samantha was too good for you. Getting her involved would just cause problems. No, you’ve told Pete. It’s not like it’s urgent. You’ll keep the box for now. Return it later.

Satisfied that you’ve done the right thing you order a large Chinese takeaway and get out your suit for inspection. It’s only while you’re eating your takeaway that you wonder which box it is you’ve got. Maybe you should look?

At the top of the contents is the small notebook associated with the box. The antiquarian had written his notebooks based on themes, and you’d arraigned the boxes based on the notebooks. You dip into this notebook, with its familiar, barely legible writing. Oh, this is the weirdest box of the lot. It’s the box that contains the sex magic. The antiquarian’s speculations about it contents read like bad erotica.

You look deeper.

Beneath the notebook are two bronze bracelets. 5cm in diameter. Rims 1cm wide. They are embossed with strange abstract symbols, clearly of Celtic origin, possibly writing, although there is no evidence of Celtic writing, ultimately untranslatable. But the feeling there was meaning in the symbols had always tantalised you. Is that meant to be a phallus? That almost suggests two figures copulating. No, look harder and the clarity disappears. They’re just abstract symbols.

You remember discovering the antiquarian’s take on these bracelets. He called them the Bands of Cernunnos, and claimed they would transform the wearer into a sex god.

A ludicrous idea that had circulated the department, until people would visit to see them. And everyone who had seen them had slipped them over their wrists and laughingly had proclaimed themselves a sex god. They’d wiggle their hips and twirl their arms and nothing would happen. Except sometimes the bands fell off.

Yet you’d never tried them. You hadn’t seen the point. You had been embarrassed by the whole idea. If you tried would people believe you wanted to become a sex god? Would they mock you for believing in magic? Others could joke around. You didn’t.

Maybe you should now?