Wood Sprites

5: Puzzle Box

The Chinese puzzle box took them the rest of the day to unlock.

“Esme’s lucky we’re smart,” Jillian complained.

“Maybe if we weren’t smart, she didn’t want us to open it.” Louise spread out the contents.

There were six old-fashioned 2D photographs within the box and an odd rectangle of metal slightly bigger than their pinkies.

“What’s this?” Jillian picked up the mystery item and eyed it closely.

“I don’t know.” Louise watched as Jillian carefully pulled the object into two parts. One piece was a cap that fit over some type of socket at the end.

“I think it plugs into something.” Jillian eyed the pronged ending.

Louise picked up the box and examined it closely for hidden connectors. “This doesn’t have any place to plug anything into it.”

Jillian shook her head. “If I was going to leave something for my kids before getting into a spaceship and leaving Earth forever, I’d leave a hell of lot more. Like pictures of you and our parents, and copies of my movies and Fritz.”

Fritz was Jillian’s toddler-sized handmade quilt. Their Grandmother Mayer had made both of them one before she died. Louise abandoned her blanket in some long-forgotten period of time, but Jillian’s became a fifth member of the family. For years, Jillian never went anywhere without carrying Fritz. It was how everyone told them apart — a fact they used to their advantage often. By the time they were five and starting first grade, Fritz was tattered. Their mother sewed him inside a pillowcase. While they hadn’t actually seen Fritz for years, Jillian still slept every night hugging him close.

“Who are you,” Louise asked, “and what have you done with my sister?”

Jillian stuck out her tongue. “I know that Esme is still alive out there someplace, but it’s like she’s dead. She’s gone and never coming back, and that’s a lot like dead and buried. Taking Fritz would be like destroying him, too.”

“I would take him. I would want the company. My kid can get her own blanket.”

Jillian laughed and waved the odd piece of metal. “Well, that explains this box then. She took all the cool stuff and only left us this garbage.”

Louise held out her hand, and Jillian gave her the mystery item. “I think it’s an old computer part. They used to have all sorts of cables and plugs and things.” She took out her phone and took several photos of it. “I’ll run it through Whatsit.”

Jillian spread the 2D photographs out onto the bedspread. They were portraits of three men, two boys, and a woman whose eyes had been masked by black Magic Marker. Between the glossy photos was a folded scrap of paper. Jillian unfolded the note and read it. “Beware the Empire of Evil. They will destroy everything you love to get ahold of you.”

Louise shivered. “That is seriously creepy.” She picked up the photo of a man in a space suit, patches identifying him as one of the NASA astronauts, apparently from before the Chinese took dominance in space. The patches were too small to read no matter how hard she squinted at them. “Wow, these are old. There are no digital tags to identify these people. What you see is all you get.”

“There’s writing on the back,” Jillian said.

Louise flipped the photo over. “How low tech. She went into space when?”

“Eighteen years ago. What does it say?”

“‘The King of Denmark, Neil Shenske.’ I think this is Esme’s father. Her bio said that her father was an astronaut. This is our grandfather.”

“We’re Danish princesses?” Jillian was obviously wavering between fantastical possibility and the logic that princesses weren’t born from abandoned embryos. Louise was riding the same emotional rollercoaster.

“Nothing on Esme said anything about her being a princess.” Louise forced herself to point out the most logical evidence they had.

They both did searches, racing to find more information.

“American astronaut, inspired by Apollo Moon shots, flew two space-shuttle missions.”

“Born in Ohio. Went to MIT. Married Anna Cohan. Had two daughters, Lain and Esme.”

“He was killed in a drive-by shooting at a science fair at an inner-city school. Esme was four when he died.”

“I’m not finding any reference to him being the king of Denmark.”

“He’s not even Danish.”

Louise flipped the photo and frowned at the words. “Maybe it’s some kind of code.”

“What do the others say?” Jillian picked up the photo of a dark-haired young man who looked like a movie star caught in a candid moment, his focus intently on something off-camera. Jillian read the back and giggled.

“What does it say?”

“‘Crown Prince Kiss Butt of the Evil Empire.’” Jillian giggled more. “It also says, ‘Yes, you’re smarter, but he’s sadistic and short-tempered. Don’t get snarky with him.’ Esme must have thought we’d be snarky as well as clever. We’re not snarky.”

“Elle Pondwater thinks we’re snarky.”

“Elle is rarely right about anything. Besides, snarky is not genetic.”

Louise rather thought it might be but didn’t want to argue the point. The two blond boys were more average looking. There was, however, a strong family resemblance with the crown prince. “Flying Monkey Four and Five. Where are one, two, and three?”

Jillian shrugged, and they made sure there were no other photos, either still in the box or somehow stuck to the others. Esme had drawn black Magic Marker across the eyes of the woman and trailed it off so the line nearly looked like cloth ribbon blindfolding her. Louise studied the photo, trying to understand their mother. What was the point of a photo if they couldn’t see all of the woman’s face? The black line did emphasize the woman’s elegance. Her mouth was flawlessly defined by lipstick into a perfect bow that nature hadn’t blessed her with. She had a strong, determined chin. Every hair of her pale blond bob was in place. She wore a black silk blouse and an amber teardrop necklace. The back of her photo read: “Queen Gertrude of Denmark, blind to her husband’s crimes led to Hamlet’s death. Careful, lest her blindness lead to your capture.”

“Hamlet?” Louise said. “Like the play? Do you think she’s an actress?”

“I think you’re right. It’s some kind of code.”

“Some code. Hi, I went off to space and left you in the fridge, here’s a nice puzzle to hurt your brain.”

Jillian giggled and then sobered. “She probably left the box for Alexander, not us.” She pulled up the digital photos of Alexander. The one of her labeled “nine years old” could have been Louise with her blast-shortened hair. “We really don’t look like Esme or her father at all.”

“Crown Prince Kiss Butt and the flying monkeys look like brothers. They have the same cheekbones, and their eyes look vaguely Asian.”

Jillian nodded in agreement. “There’s no flying monkeys in Hamlet, though. At least none that I remember.” She struck a dramatic pose. “To be or not to be, that is the question: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.” Jillian paused in mid-dramatic gesture. “Oh! I wonder. Hamlet’s story is about him trying to deal with the murder of his father — the King of Denmark. The odds are so stacked against him that he pretends to be insane for a part of the play.”

“It ends badly for Hamlet?”

“Very badly. But there’s no monkeys — flying or otherwise.”

Louise trusted Jillian to know any trivia connected to Hamlet. She tried searching the other direction. “Most of the hits for ‘flying monkey’ are for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It’s about a young girl who is swept up by a storm and deposited on another world filled with magical creatures.”

“Maybe that’s a reference to Elfhome.”

“You know what’s odd?” Jillian studied Anna’s photo and then the boys who might be brothers. “Neil and Anna are the only ones that are looking at the camera. The rest of these seem to be taken without the person aware that they’re being photographed.”

Louise checked the last photo. The man was sitting at a table in a large sunroom, reading a paper, steam curling up from a cup in front of him. He was striking to look at, with unnaturally white skin and odd amber eyes. His coloring made him seem unreal, like he was a vampire or something. His hair was white, as if he was old, but his face was unlined, making it impossible to guess his age. He was reading an old-fashioned newspaper and seemed unaware of the camera. “I think you’re right. They’re like stalker pictures.”

“What does that one say?”

Louise flipped over the picture of the man with the newspaper. “This one says: ‘Ming the Merciless of the Empire of Evil.’”

“It’s another literature reference.” Jillian frowned at the screen of her tablet. “Ming is an evil emperor from a movie series called Flash Gordon filmed in the mid-1900s. Ming has a large army with everything from death rays to robots poised to take over Earth. But he doesn’t look anything like this guy.”

Louise stared at the photos. “Our genetic donor was weird.”

Whatsit identified the item in the box as a “flash drive” with a “USB connector” and had diagrams on how it used to plug into the side of the clunky computers which were common at the turn of the century.

“It could have anything on it.” Louise read through the description of the technology’s development. Assuming that Esme used the most advanced one she could buy at the time, it could represent a large amount of data. “Photographs. A video blog.”

“But we don’t have anything to plug it into!” Jillian growled.

“We could buy an old computer. . or something,” Louise murmured. They couldn’t be the only people who had had this problem. It turned out that it had been a common difficulty shortly after computers started to use wireless connections exclusively. Adapters had been made so the flash drives could be plugged in to a transmitter and accessed. They would need to download emulators so their tablets could run the decades-old software, but it was just juggling data once a connection was made.

She found several places still selling adapters and whimpered at the price. It wasn’t expensive, but it still was a lot more than she had left in her mobile payment account. Louise checked Jillian’s account to see if they could pool their money. “We don’t have enough money.”

Jillian winced. “It’s going to take weeks to have enough with our allowance.”

“If Mom and Dad don’t dock us for the cost of the playhouse.”

“Shh!” Jillian whispered. “Don’t give them ideas.”

“Maybe we can sell something.”

“No,” Jillian said. “All we have left after the fire is our video-processing equipment, and we’re not selling that. We don’t know what’s on the flash drive, and it might be useless crap.” She glared at the photos, the flash drive, and the scrap of paper with the cryptic warning. “Our stupid genetic donor.”