Geometric fox in a coffin outline on forearm

Old Pell kept a workshop under the stairs at Ashdown Tower, back when there were still men who knew how to fit a hinge. He made the boxes for whoever the estate lost, plain pine with a black border painted round the lid, and nobody ever asked for anything fancy. One October a fox came in off the bin yard and sat on his bench watching him plane a board. Thin as a coat hanger, half its fur gone to mange, and it had a way of standing on its back legs and looking at you sideways, like a clerk checking a ledger.

The fox stopped coming for scraps once it started asking for things. Pell heard it scratching at the door the night the wind tore the roof off the drying shed. Build me a box, it said, in the voice of a man who has been up all night. Pell said foxes don't talk, and the fox said they don't need to when they can hold a chisel. So Pell measured it from nose to tail and built a coffin narrow enough to lie in, out of the good oak he'd been saving for himself.

Here's the part nobody believes. Next morning the box was empty, and the fox was standing on the fourteenth-floor landing with its face to the window, its shadow cut across the concrete in sharp grey planes like folded paper. After that the lift bell rang at three every night, and folk saw it riding up and down, never stopping at the same floor twice. Pell swore the fox had only borrowed the box to be measured for something. Now mind the step, and goodnight.