THE STEEL BOX
A Short Story
by John M. Redoix
Copyright 2014
There once was a lonely girl.
As the name might suggest, she walked the path of life alone. Her parents had died as she slept in her cradle. At an early age, she came to the realization that the people who she had seen as her friends were far from it. You've heard a story like that a little over a thousand times at this point, surely. So, perhaps I do not need to elaborate any further on the nature of the poor girl's lonesome world.
I'm afraid that I cannot, however, tell you the reasons for why she was never truly accepted in the world. It would be easy for me to say "she was different" or "she was truly an unlikeable person" or "she did not want to be accepted by people to begin with". And while I could indeed say such things, and while you would have no choice but to accept them as the truth - I cannot.
For you see, I am merely the narrator. My role is to simply tell the events as they once occured on the stage as accurately as possible. As for the people on it, however... well - that is a different matter, I'm afraid. Because my role is limited to the events alone.
As for people... they are a different matter, you see. Sure, they could, in their retelling of the story, note how they felt and how they chose to watch the situation. But could you honestly claim that such an account is truthful? People lie to themselves just as much as they lie to others. And nobody truly knows the true nature of a person. You are free to claim otherwise - but I like to think I'm entitled to my own truth just as you are to yours. And thus, I cannot testify as to the true nature of the girl in question.
Apologies for the digression. I only wanted you to be aware of my own perspective of the events I shall describe shortly.
Time passed and the lonely girl turned into a lonely woman.
Her hair grew, eventually reaching her hips. She never had it cut or trimmed. And yet, she took good care of it, making sure to wash it every day. Her face was that of pure beauty - the face one would always attribute to a character from a fairy tale. A face which, despite different people's imaginations and personal tastes, would be the same if you were to compare them.
That said, I believe that the constant expression on that beautiful face was one limited to a single character: Rapunzel. The face of a woman imprisoned at the top of an ivory tower, waiting for someone to come and rescue her. I cannot claim that she was truly like her, of course. While she might have had her face, Rapunzel's gold hair she did not posses. On the contrary, her aforementioned hair was as dark as cinder.
It matched her eyes.
The girl traveled. She never stayed in one place for long. Her parents had left her a generous sum of money which she had been willing to spent down to the last cent. Thus, finding a bed to spend the cold nights in during that period of her life was never an issue. The girl met many individuals during that time, and many of them asked her for the reasons of her travel. To which she simply told them:
"I am searching for the secret of the universe."
Years passed. The girl traveled and traveled, walked and walked, searched and searched. On every day she opened her eyes she discovered that still was as beautiful as she had been the day before. But her age was easy to tell by the exhaustion slowly creeping up on her face. It is hard to tell, but I suspect that the woman had gotten sick at some point, as well. There were many days she appeared to be dizzy or in pain. The strangers she had been meeting on the way began telling her one after another to turn back and go home. That she would not find anything on her journey except for more questions.
And yet, as if ignoring all the warnings, the girl continued to travel. Eventually, she had lost money to afford transportation. That did not affect her, for she then chose to walk.
She visited the ones called the wisest. She spoke to those who had risen above others with knowledge. The answers to her questions she begged out of the modest and forced out of the greedy. And yet, neither of the two groups could answer her very last question:
"What is the secret of the universe?"
No matter how much she searched, no matter where she went and no matter who she asked - she could not learn the answer to that last question. Whether the wisemen she'd asked simply lied in that regard, hiding the truth from her, or truly did not possess the answer she was seeking, she would never know for certain. And thus, neither would I.
More years passed. And I suspect that the woman was at the end of her strengths. She was not foolish or blind. She knew that her body would not allow her to continue walking forever. Her hope that she would ever find the answer to her question was wavering more and more as days continued to pass. If I had been in her shoes, perhaps I would have turned my efforts into stopping the passage of time altogether. But I suppose I am as ordinary as anyone else. She was as well, regardless of the way she looked and people or people looked at her. The woman was still ordinary.
Until the day she became different.
She had found herself in a desert. How, I'm afraid I don't know - the circumstances behind it are irrelevant to the story, I suppose. Nobody can answer your question, anyway. The steps she'd left in the sand that day are long gone, the directions meaningless.
And it was as she walked that she saw it.
The steel box.
There were no traces of how it had got there. Some would say that it had always been there, waiting for someone to find it. Some more logical would simply claim that it had simply fallen out of a plane or something of the sort. Some more idealistic would claim that God had placed it there as part of his grand plan to answer the girl's question.
The box itself was one meters by one meter in length and width, and two and a half meters in height. There were no markings - not even so much as a scratch - on it. Thus, as I said earlier, its origin is impossible to determine conclusively. One of the four sides appeared to have something resembling a knob on it. And a keyhole. Well - of course it did. That side was a door.
Luckily, or perhaps intentionally, the door was unlocked. And the woman opened it.
Inside of the steel box were two objects. One of them was a key. The other... nobody knows. I have my suspicions, of course, but it would achieve very little to speculate without proof.
And yet, it is said that second object answered the woman's question.
Because upon opening that steel box, she had learned the secret of the universe.
And what did she do with it, you may ask?
She took the box, presented it to all, describing her story exactly as I am describing it now. She let people get into the box. She let them examine it. She let them ask her many questions. At first, they were jokes. For the others did not believe in the woman's tale. This did not seem to faze her, however. She continued to let them do those things. And when she saw that they had had enough...
...she performed a magic trick.
It was quite simple. A concept which you've probably heard of , or perhaps even thought of immediately when it came to magic and a steel box.
The woman entered the box, closing the door behind her. A click was then heard, indicating that she had locked the door of the box from the inside with the key. She would ask the spectators, speaking from the box, of course, to try opening the door as hard as they could to confirm that it was locked. The spectators did so.
Satisfied that the inspection was complete, she then told them from inside of the box:
"This is the secret of the universe!"
Spectators will tell you that the lights of the room they had all been standing in flickered for a split second. The box had not moved an inch. They had not heard a sound. For the longest time, they were convinced that the illusion had yet to actually take place. Even though some believed that there
was no trick to be had at all, simply assuming that the girl had chosen to shut herself into the box for all eternity so that she could be left to her loneliness.
What the spectators, however, did not know was that the lonesome woman had, at that very time, been spotted on the other side of the city. They learned of this when the woman herself returned for her box after an hour. She took her key, unlocked the box and showed that there was indeed nobody else in it.
The spectators were baffled, but more skeptical than ever. They demanded to examine the box once more. And she complied. She allowed them an entire day to examine it.
But at the end of that day, the spectators had discovered nothing. No secret exists, no fake walls, no holes, no buttons, no fake or broken locks, no fake keys and no apparent accomplices. They questioned the people that had seen her on the other side of the city and they all appeared to have nothing to do with the woman. The same could easily be said for all the original spectators.
They knew it was a trick. They were convinced it was a trick.
And yet, it was impossible. There was simply no logical explanation for it.
And thus, the only possible conclusion was that it was, in fact, not a trick. That the woman had powers beyond their means of understanding.
The woman kept traveling, performing the same trick over and over again. Facing off the same greatest minds she had faced once before, challenging them to provide an answer.
None could do it.
Her health continued to deteriorate, but she did not appear to care. Her only purpose had become to keep performing the trick. Again, and again, and again.
"This is the secret of the universe!" she would proudly proclaim.
And none could question it.
...Or so everyone said.
---
There once was a man.
He had heard of many stories regarding the lonely woman. He had traveled a lot, you see, and everyone he went, they would tell him:
"She knows the secret of the universe."
Since the man was lonely and saw no purpose in his life other than wandering, he decided to follow the woman in hopes of seeing the trick for himself. The more he heard, the more fascinated he became. It was to the point of obsession, some might claim.
And at last, he had eventually caught the woman.
When he did, he did not care for her beautiful face, her hair (which had at that point been at her feet in length) or the gaze of her dark eyes. He wanted the trick.
The man did not even need to request it of her - she knew what he wanted from her. And so, she took him to an abandoned theater, placed the box on the stage and asked the man to take a seat in one of the front row seats. The man, however, refused. He insisted that he be in front of the door to the box. The woman had no objects to his wish.
Before the trick began, he did something the woman had not expected of him.
"What is your name?" he asked her.
She was, of course, taken aback. Nobody had asked her the question in years. Decades, even.
"Why does that matter? Are you not here for the trick?" she, in turn, asked him.
"I am. But you are the one performing it. Does that not make you as important as the trick itself? Are you not the only one who knows how to do it? Are you not the one who knows the secret to the universe? Are you, thus, not the most important person I would ever get a chance to meet?"
The woman smiled. "...But I am not the only one who knows, sir. I have not been hiding the secret. Quite the contrary - I've been sharing it with as many people as I could find. The nature of this trick and the nature of the universe are one in the same. One leads to the other. I see no reason to consider myself important - I merely tell the tale. It's up to the audience to understand it."
"Why? Why not simply tell it? Why make it a puzzle?" the man continued, unsatisfied with the answer. "Are you merely seeking attention?"
She shrugged. "Look at it however you wish. My role is to perform the trick and yours is to try and figure it out."
The lonely woman entered the box.
"What is your name?" the man asked again.
"I am what the world made me." the woman's muffled voice told him through the steel walls of the box.
The man did not respond. From that point on, his interest lied solely in the trick itself.
He waited.
...
And waited.
...
And waited.
He stood on that stage, in front of the steel box, for what seemed to him like days. But he continued to wait patiently, regardless. He was convinced that the woman would not be able to deceive him. He was convinced that he would know the secret of the universe upon discovering the truth.
...
And so, he waited in front of that steel box.
Unaware that he would never see the trick in all its glory.
Unaware that the person inside the box would never reappear outside of it on that stage again.
Unaware that they had, after all those years, failed to leave it.
Unaware that the body of the lonely woman inside of the box had betrayed her at last.
###
This story, is, to those who have read my previous two works up to this point: The Problem of the Straton Murder and The Rules of the Game, quite different in the sense that it is not really something that would fit into the category of detective fiction to begin with.
And yet, it is most certainly a mystery. A bizarre one, perhaps. But it is a mystery, nevertheless. It has a trick and it has its own solution.
Naturally, whether you choose to search for it or not is up to you, the reader. As it should be. There is no need for me to present you a "solution". It is there.
You merely have to acknowledge the secret of the universe.
-- J. R.