She had always been an imaginative child.
Nobody would have suspected that the large cardboard box that sat snugly in the far corner of her bedroom, the one that the new refrigerator had come in last year, was in fact a time machine. Well, not exactly a time machine, yet. It was a work in progress. It was being built. When she had asked her parents if she could have the box in her room, they had been surprisingly tolerant about it. Carrying it up to her room had been a difficult thing and quite a drama. Her parents had found a fair measure of humour in the thing.
It had a small opening on the side, much like a dog-flap. Inside, was a small podium, on top of which was mounted the main control unit. It had taken several months to accrue all the materials necessary. These had been mainly easy to acquire things, such as empty tissue boxes, kitchen foil, rubber bands, empty cans, sticky tape, contact adhesive, lengths of wire, in fact, a great deal of wire. When she first began building it she had hoped it would be like the Tardis, very much bigger on the inside than on the outside, but it wasn’t. However, it was truly remarkable that the whole thing ran on just two ‘triple a’ batteries.
As the time drew closer and closer to the evening when it was planned to activate it, she found it extremely hard suppressing her excitement. This, together with the idea of surprising and impressing her parents. She thought this outcome would be an added bonus. Unfortunately, she hadn’t fully thought the whole thing through properly.
On the morning she went missing, all the usual reports and enquiries started up.
It was several days before anybody noted the absence of the box.