When she entered her office with the antique box, Vita cast a fleeting glance at the answering machine. Before she left for town, she had erased her sister’s voice from the tape, and now the light glowed a steady red. No new messages. Good. That meant Mary Kate had given up.
She sat behind her desk and stared out the window for a moment—not that she could see much. Vita’s office had once been a large sunroom on the southeast corner of the house, surrounded by windows on two sides. But the sunlight rarely got in anymore; she had let the privet hedge next to the foundation grow up until it wove into a living curtain of green through which no prying eyes could penetrate. Someone walking by on the sidewalk might see a pinpoint of light or two peering out, like separated stars in a near-empty galaxy, but they couldn’t see Vita, and she couldn’t see them.
With the Treasure Box at her elbow, she spent an hour and a half thumbing through her large collection of books about antiques. By the time she had turned the final page of the last one, she had a stack three feet high on the floor beside the desk.
She had located two dozen or more Victorian memorabilia boxes, ranging in value from a few dollars to several thousand, but nothing resembling the box she had discovered at Pastimes.
Heaving a sigh of frustration, she loaded her arms full and began replacing the books on the shelves that lined the two walls not taken up by windows. Her eyes lingered on a framed bulletin board filled with postcards, visual representations of places she had written about in the past: the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Trevi Fountain in Rome, an estate in the Cotswolds that had been turned into very affordable holiday cottages, a beer garden in Munich, a dairy farm in Wales. All places as familiar to her as this room . . . except that she had never seen a single one of them.
But that was one of the wonders of the modern world, wasn’t it? Vita didn’t actually have to go anywhere. She could just log on, click a few buttons, and through the magic of virtual reality, experience whatever her heart desired without the claustrophobia of crowded airports or the inconvenience of delayed flights or the worry about lost passports or stolen funds.
The Internet. Of course! Maybe her reference books didn’t have the information she needed, but she knew where to go to find it. If there was anything to be learned about the value of the Treasure Box, she’d uncover it on the Web.
She hastily finished putting the books away, sat down in front of her computer, and logged on. From a long way away, she heard a faint rumbling noise—was the area due for a thunderstorm? She clicked a cloud icon on the screen: sure enough, the weather service predicted “the likelihood of precipitation in the afternoon and early evening, moderate to heavy in some locations, with significant electrical activity.” Translation: a good chance for a thunderstorm.
Vita considered whether or not she should shut down her computer. Two years ago, her hard drive had been scrambled by a power outage, and three months’ worth of research had been lost. Still, this probably wouldn’t take very long, and she had a new surge protector in case of power spikes or brownouts.
She logged onto eBay and ran a general search for “Victorian memorabilia boxes,” but the offerings were meager. A general Web search through various antique sites seemed more promising, but after thirty-five minutes of sorting through photographs which seemed to take forever to download, she came up empty-handed.
Raindrops began to spatter the windowpanes, and the thunder drew closer. Just one more attempt, and then she’d shut down. She exited the current site and tried a more specific search, using the words from the lid of the box: Enchanted Treasure Chest.
The screen shifted, and as her cursor turned into a rotating hourglass, a notice came up on the bottom of the screen: Downloading . . . 2%, 6%, 10%. Remaining time: less than one minute.
Vita drummed her fingers impatiently. She must have hit the right one this time.
Rain pelted against the glass in force now. A heavy cloud cover shrouded the room in gray, and she heard lightning crack in the distance. But the storm was still far enough away; she wasn’t about to shut down now.
A Web site filled the screen, a star-studded sky with a banner across the top that read, Welcome to the Enchanted Box: Antiques for the Electronic Age.
Vita scrolled down through the site map. Furniture, jewelry, art, estate pieces. Nothing about nineteenth-century memorabilia. She was just about to click on the link to “Accessories” when she saw it. In the upper right-hand corner of the home page, a tiny moving icon. A box. A small blue box with some kind of writing on the top, opening and closing, revolving on its axis.
She rolled her cursor to the top of the page, hovered over the moving icon, and watched as it turned into a little white hand with one finger pointing upward. “Yes!” she whispered. “It’s a link.”
This had to be it.
She held her breath and clicked the icon. At the same moment, a writhing bolt of lightning struck the tree outside her window. Thunder rattled the house, the lights went out, and the computer screen faded to black.
When the lightning hit, Vita felt a tingle come up through the mouse and keyboard into her arms. She shut her eyes and put her hands to her temples, praying—if you could call “God, no!” a prayer—that she hadn’t fried the motherboard.
A minute passed, then two, while she sat there holding her head. She was just reaching for the telephone to call the power company when the lights flickered back on. The surge protector on her computer desk gave a faint little beep, and its red light changed to green, a signal that electricity had been restored and everything was all right. Maybe.
Vita pushed the button to restart her computer, and while it booted up, she rose and went to the window to see if she could assess the damage from the lightning strike. But the thick hedge screened the yard from view so effectively that she could see only dark shapes. Behind her, she heard the characteristic beeps and clicks as the computer went through its start-up procedures. She let out a sigh of relief, went through the dining room, and stepped out onto the front porch.
Although threatening clouds still hung in the sky, the storm had rolled through quickly, and the rain had stopped. Everything had been washed clean; the air smelled charged and fresh, like the atmosphere of a younger, more vibrant world. The roof seemed intact—that was a good sign. One massive limb, almost large enough to be a tree in its own right, had fallen from the big oak tree in the side yard, but there was no other damage as far as Vita could see. She went back into the house, latching the screen behind her but leaving the door open to let in some of that fresh air.
Her computer had finished its boot-up and gone to a screen saver. Vita took her place at the keyboard. She had lost the Web site when the power went down, but now that she knew where to look, she could get it back easily enough. Right now she needed to make sure her new project files were intact, or she would have to recreate more than a month of work on the Alaska project.
She could just imagine the conversation with her editor:
“Nick, it’s Vita Kirk. I’m—well, I’m going to be a little late on my deadline. You see, lightning struck my hard drive, and—”
Sheer genius, Vita thought. Almost as convincing as “the dog ate my homework.”
Vita touched the Enter key, and her screen saver disappeared.
But instead of the familiar desktop with her program icons around the perimeter, she found herself staring at a dark blue screen studded with tiny white stars. It looked a bit like the home page she had been on a few minutes before, except that there were no headers, no menus, no nothing—just a tiny keyhole in the center. But how had she gotten back on-line without logging on?
She rolled her pointer to the top left of the screen, hoping for a drop-down menu that would let her exit the program. Nothing.
She went to the bottom. No response there. She pressed Escape, even unplugged the telephone line, but nothing helped. At last she simply shut down and started the computer again. There would be a delay while the automated disk-scanning program checked out her hard drive for damage, but it couldn’t be avoided.
Vita waited and watched while the scan-disk program went through its survey of the hard drive, exhaling a sigh of relief as the titles of her familiar programs and working files flashed by.
So far so good. The dog hadn’t eaten her homework after all.
The safety protocol finished, and her desktop flickered on the screen for just an instant. But before she could open a single file, it was gone again. The same blue-black sky with its scattering of diamond-like stars filled the monitor.
Great, Vita thought. Somehow, between the storm and the lightning strike and the icon on the Web site, I’ve managed to download a virus. I just hope I can get rid of it before it eats any of my hard drive.
But no matter what she tried, she could not access her anti-virus program or any of the other programs installed on her hard drive. Over and over she rebooted, but every time with the same results. The virus didn’t seem to be doing any damage; it was simply blocking her from entering her own computer.
“All right,” she muttered to herself after the fifth attempt.
“If I can’t get around it, I suppose I’ll just have to go through.”
She sat there for a long time with her hand poised on the mouse, staring at the screen. The field of stars looked so deep— three-dimensional, as if you could reach out and touch them, as real as actual constellations in the night sky. Was that the Big Dipper over there on the left? And Orion? And the North Star?
Did she really see a comet shoot by?
Vita shook herself back to reality. It was a Web site, for heaven’s sake. A sophisticated one, but still, they could do almost anything with computers these days.
She peered at the central icon, which seemed to have grown with every attempt to shut the program down. When she had first seen it, it had been tiny, no larger than a single lowercase letter on her word processing program. Now it dominated the center of the screen, and she could see that it, too, had depth and substance, like the starry sky. It was three-dimensional, an ornate brass keyhole on a carved backplate—the kind of keyhole one might find in an elaborately appointed Victorian home. Vita’s own house had none of those touches, but she had seen them before. And now she saw something else—light streaming through the keyhole. Not one of the myriad of stars in the background, but living light, as if there were something on the other side, something you would be able to see if you put your eye up very close.
She rolled her pointer to the center of the screen, directly over the light, and waited. But instead of turning into a hand, the cursor transformed into something else: a key. A large, ornate brass skeleton key. Before she could quite absorb the reality of this metamorphosis, a low, whispery voice emanated from her computer speakers:
“Love is the key that unlocks every portal.”
With her heart pounding and her blood pumping in her ears, Vita touched the mouse and slipped the key into the lock.
For a moment, nothing happened. And then, as if an invisible door were swinging open in the night sky, a crack appeared.
Golden light streamed out in a narrow beam. The portal grew larger. The crack widened and widened until the door stood fully open and filled the monitor in front of her. The light became brighter and more intense, so dazzling that Vita had to put her hand up to shield her eyes.
The door began to rush toward her at great speed. Vita grabbed at the edge of the desk to keep from falling. Though her rational mind knew that she was sitting perfectly still, safe in her chair in front of the computer, her body experienced all the sensations of motion, as if she were in an Imax Theater or a very fast express elevator. Her head spun, and her stomach floated for a second or two.
And then she saw inside.
“Inside” seemed to be a rudimentary kind of workshop, a small room with stone walls and exposed beams and a rough table in the center. At the table, surrounded by a scattering of tools and a bright kerosene lamp, a man in shirt sleeves sat motionless with his head bent over a box—a small metal chest painted blue. In his hand he held a paintbrush, and there were flecks of gold-colored paint in his thinning brown hair.
Vita ran her cursor in circles over the scene, pausing on the box, the lamp, the paintbrush, the table, even the man himself, to see if she could get a link that would allow her to exit the program. But nothing worked.
The voice came again, low and entreating: “His name is Jacob Stillwater. Watch and learn.”
Then the flame of the lamp began to flicker, and the man began to move.