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The Koffer – Intro

When Lisa left the elevator – as every morning, she hesitated for the blink of an eye, when she noticed the old trunk leaning on the freshly painted wall to her left. ‘What the hell…’, the janitor used to chase every little dings that did not belong to here like the devil a lost soul. She stopped now and looked at the foreign object curiously. It was covered with a thick layer of dust, the locks rusty and open. A small oval half-blind label praised the material as “Genuine …”. No doubt this has been a poor-people´s-suitcase centuries ago. One side of the trunk did not close tightly and the tail of some fabric with blue-white pattern poked out, maybe some sort of cheap home dress.

‘A dismembered corpse inside’, her first thought. It made her smirk, this obsession with murder was becoming a little bit peculiar. ‘You will end as an old spinster, buried under tons of newspapers and trash, alongside with a crowd of mummified cats…’, she made one of her morbid jokes to herself.
As she knew from her favorite TV series, she tried to catch a smell – nothing, just old dust. ‘No corpse’, she concluded, still smiling. ‘Well, maybe a mummified one…’ She laughed now and went away, forgetting all about that ding.

In the evening, after a tense working day, she remembered “the corpse in the trunk” again, when she told her lover about it and her first thought. He had noticed “the thing” too. Now he furrowed his brow in slight concern about her bizarre connotations. Serial killers! If he did not knew better, one could think, this was her only occupation. He could not comprehend, his hair stood on end just for the thought. Not from fear but from reluctance to deal with the abysmal depths of human soul.
Her lover. She called him her lover after 21 years still. And she really felt like that. Their obsession being something precious, exciting, forbidden. Why? None of them could explain, but they relished it deeply and to the full. “The koffer” felt something alike, at least for Lisa.

The relict from the past did not vanish as expected. It remained there rooted to the spot. While it was strange already that it appeared at all, it seemed odd enough, that it rested there since their first encounter. From the day, the restoration of this huge industrial complex from the end of the last century had been finished, the property management did not tolerate the slightest dog´s breakfast in the corridors, not to mention the storage of abandoned, battered objects. The building was downright spotlessly aseptic since the restoration – from roof to basement. Not even Lisa´s cat had fun anymore strolling the aisles. No mouse would pitch her tent here voluntarily anymore, not to mention cockroaches, her cat´s favorite toy. On the other hand, if people wanted to get rid of discarded objects, they just left it right at the spot in front of the elevator, where Lisa found the trunk. You could be sure, that everything disappeared within hours – one of the employées of more than 70 companies located here would find your leftovers attractive enough to pick it up.

One could get the impression, that nobody dared to touch the shabby suitcase. Maybe there was a bomb hidden in it? ‘Nonsense’, Lisa thought to herself. The intact cover of dust proofed that the body of the trunk had been untouched for years – if not for centuries. ‘You don´t need a private eye for this conclusion…’

Lisa was inquisitive. Pathologically curious, how Lisa called it. So it was unavoidable, that the trunk stimulated her imagination.

Four weeks passed by. One sunday morning – the building is deserted on weekends – when the relict still spread it´s aura of mystery, Lisa´s patience ended suddenly. She snatched the trunk and dragged it to her cave. The koffer tried to resist by emitting small fusty-dusty clouds of defiance. ‘It´s done – finally…’, Lisa thought satisfied, when she dropped the trunk in her anteroom. She still did not dare to open it – somehow the ding seemed a little bit fishy to her…