The Realm of Magic
Most people consider the Internet a useful educational tool, a convenient place to shop, an effective means of communication or a valuable asset to their businesses. Less tech-savvy individuals cower at the idea of the massive network of servers and clients, either baffled by the technology or frightened of losing their personal privacy or having their identity stolen. Then there are those to whom the World Wide Web is a magical portal to another world, a vast land of wonder and enchantment, an imaginary playground where they can escape the tedium and loneliness of their daily lives.
Such an Internet-enamored person was Kate McMahon or, as she was known to her like-minded friends in cyberspace, M'Lady Enchantress. A shy, plain, unassuming young woman, after a short, painful, disastrous relationship, she resigned herself to remaining single. In place of romance, she brought her girlhood fantasies to life through the skillful use of Photoshop and familiarity with HTML. Not living with the demands of a normal social life, she spent nearly all of her free time working on her website. Its pages featured her original poetry and artwork. Castles, knights, unicorns, wizards and fairies were beautifully displayed on colorful, multi-tiered backgrounds and accompanied by her favorite medieval-era music. The site was a joy to behold.
Seeking to be an active participant in the Internet community, she took part in chat rooms, joined online women's groups and competed in website competitions. In doing so, she made many new friends, most of whom also used fictitious personas such as DragonFyre, Faerie Maiden, Princess Ravena and the Dark Wytch.
One evening, while she was reading the entries in her online guestbook, Kate found an unusual graphic among the advertising, personal messages and comments about her website. It was not like the PSP-produced calling cards or signature tags she usually received. It was a simple drawing of a plain white envelope with her name written on it in an elaborate old-world font.
Dragging the optical mouse across her desk, she moved her cursor over the image. The arrow turned into a pointing finger, indicating that the envelope was a hyperlink. With a click on the link, a fantasy-filled screen appeared.
In the middle of a cleverly designed Java applet were the words "You are cordially invited to enter the Realm of Magic."
No sooner did Kate read the clever email message than the page faded and her guestbook entries reappeared.
* * *
Denny Brinkman rolled his wheelchair over to his desk and turned on the computer. Like Kate McMahon, he found the Internet a welcome escape from reality, but his fantasies were more mature in nature than hers were. He enjoyed visiting adults-only sites, admiring the women and reminiscing about the pre-Desert Storm days before he was injured and confined to a wheelchair when he led a full life and was not dead from the waist down.
Denny was only eighteen years old when he enlisted in the armed forces, a mere boy, but by his twentieth birthday, he had become an embittered man, emotionally traumatized, addicted to morphine and condemned to spend the rest of his years a prisoner of his wheelchair.
After looking at several live webcams, strategically placed in enterprising young college girls' dorm rooms on a site where peeping Toms were welcome—for a price—he opened Outlook Express to check his email. Thanks to the Internet, it was easy for Denny to keep in touch with many of his old Army buddies.
He went down the long list of emails, trying to find the legitimate messages in the multitude of spam in his inbox.
"Viagra!" he laughed bitterly, jabbing the mouse button to delete the advertisement. "Unless it can raise the dead, I'm not interested."
The former soldier deleted more than three dozen junk emails, all trying to either sell a product or elicit money in some other manner.
"What the hell is this?" he mumbled when he saw the graphic of a plain white envelope addressed to him by name.
He opened it out of curiosity. Why not? He had nothing better to do with his time.
The image of a scantily clad, beautiful young woman appeared on the screen. The buxom wench was carrying a banner that read, "You are cordially invited to enter the Realm of Magic."
Before Denny could scroll down to search for an accompanying link, the image disappeared. So, too, did the message in his inbox.
"What the ...? If some jerk sent me another virus, I'm gonna find him and kill him. I had to wind up replacing my computer last time!"
To be on the safe side, he quickly clicked on his antivirus program, updated his definitions and ran a complete scan. He did not want to encounter another blaster worm.
* * *
"It's the strangest thing," Kate told her coworker, Lorna Sholto, in the office lunchroom one day. "I keep getting these invitations to join a site called the Realm of Magic, yet whoever is sending them never provides a link or the URL for the site itself."
"It's probably just another advertiser," Lorna replied. "They'll get you interested first, and then they'll make their pitch."
Rena Dolman, a newly hired claims examiner who was sitting at the next table, sniggered.
"You two spend way too much time on your computers," she declared haughtily, in that why-don't-you-get-a-life attitude of superiority that always annoyed Kate. "You should both get out and meet more people."
People, to Rena, was defined as "those of the opposite sex; men."
"Thanks for the advice," Kate said, gritting her teeth and trying to maintain the false smile on her plain, plump face. "But I'm not as outgoing as you are."
Rena smiled—what her two coworkers thought of as her "Twinkie" smile: too much sweetness and no sincerity.
"Whatever!" she replied.
"Come on," Lorna said, looking at her wristwatch. "We've got to get back to work."
Kate returned to her desk in a sullen mood. Rena never ceased to get under her skin. The pretty, shapely blonde received flowers at the office at least three times a month and regaled the other women in the lunchroom every Monday with stories of her exciting dates the previous weekend.
At four o'clock, an hour before the insurance company's workday came to an end, Kate needed to send a letter to an attending physician, requesting a claimant's long-term prognosis. The moment she deactivated her computer's screen saver the now familiar white envelope appeared on her desktop. A beautiful faerie with shimmering iridescent wings popped out of the envelope in a masterful piece of computer animation.
The faerie seemed to look out from the Dell Inspiron's monitor, directly into Kate's eyes, as it said in a high-pitched, lyrical voice, "M'Lady Enchantress, you are cordially invited to journey to the Realm of Magic."
The faerie then raised a golden wand and sent a shimmering burst of tiny twinkling lights across the screen. But in the proverbial wink of an eye, Kate could see only the standard blue Windows Vista desktop.
* * *
Denny sat at his computer, engrossed in a private chat room that had been created by another Persian Gulf veteran, a place where he and other living casualties of the war could gather and discuss important issues and try to help each other come to terms with the horrifying experiences they had endured. For once Denny was not interested in baseball scores, the rising price of gas or the fighting in Iraq.
"You mean none of you ever got one of those Realm of Magic envelopes in your email?" he typed.
None of them had.
The chat continued, but Denny could not get his mind off the mysterious messages he had been receiving on a regular basis. He was now fairly certain that they did not contain a new breed of virus. What were they all about then?
Later that evening, while he was visiting Sassy Vixen's Pix of the Day, he clicked on a thumbnail of a voluptuous redhead. When the photograph enlarged, the redhead, wearing a low-cut Renaissance wench-style dress, looked him in the eye and announced in a sultry voice, "M'Lady Enchantress awaits you in the Realm of Magic."
"So that's what this is all about," he said with a twinge of disappointment now that the mystery was gone. "It's been nothing but a clever promotion for a porn site."
* * *
Kate felt her life slowly unraveling. She was not getting enough sleep, her performance at work was not up to par and her patience with Rena Dolman was wearing thin. Even her appearance was suffering. Her mousy brown hair hung limp around her face, her skin was unnaturally pale and there were dark shadows under her eyes.
When Rena came to work one Monday morning, showing off a two-karat diamond engagement ring, her coworker hit rock bottom.
The shapely blonde flashed the sparkling trophy in front of Kate's face and with her Twinkie smile said, "Be honest. Wouldn't you much rather be wearing a ring like this than sitting behind a computer all the time?"
When Kate got home from work that night, instead of seeking escape in the pages of her website as she usually did, she threw herself across her twin bed and cried. Yes, she admitted to herself, she would rather have a fiancé than spend her life alone. But she was not Rena, could never look like Rena did and never act with the self-confidence that attractive women like Rena possessed.
As she lay on the bed in tears, she took a long, hard look at her future, at the empty years ahead. For the first time in her life, she prayed she would not wake up the following morning.
* * *
Denny was disappointed when he opened his Outlook Express mailbox. Again, there were no envelopes from the Realm of Magic. Why had they suddenly stopped coming? There was, however, an email from a buddy in Tennessee, a good friend he had not heard from in close to six months.
"I wonder what that old redneck has been up to," he said, chuckling with affection.
His laughter stopped abruptly as he read the email and learned that his friend was dying of cancer.
Denny rolled himself away from the computer and brushed a tear from his eye as he got a bottle of Jack Daniels out of his kitchen cabinet.
You would think I'd be used to having friends die by now, he thought bitterly, drinking directly from the bottle. How many has it been so far?
It depressed him even further to realize that he had lost count.
The Gulf War vet drank in silence, wondering for the umpteenth time what his life might have been like had he not enlisted in the Army and subsequently been injured in a car bombing. The hours passed. Eventually, Denny's head fell forward onto his chest, and the empty bottle slipped from his hand and fell to the floor.
* * *
"I'm sorry, Kate," Lars Olsen, her boss, said. "The company is downsizing, and we have to let a few people from this department go."
Kate was furious.
"But I've been here nine years; I've got seniority. Rena Dolman has only been here a little over a year. Why don't you let her go?"
Mr. Olsen was stunned. Kate had always been such a timid, mousy thing. He had never expected her to react in such a way.
"Rena has proved to be an invaluable asset to this company," he said lamely.
"An asset? She makes more mistakes than anyone in the claims section."
"It's true that she's—inexperienced, but she's a hard worker."
"Sure she is," Kate said with disgust. "And I'm sure the reason you're letting me go and keeping her has nothing to do with the short skirts and tight, low-cut sweaters she always wears."
Lars Olsen hung his head and said nothing. He was not a good enough liar to deny her accusation. Kate got up and left his office, angrily slamming the door behind her.
* * *
For the fifth morning in a row, Denny woke in his wheelchair, hung over from the night before. His head was splitting, and his body was giving off an offensive odor. As he rolled himself into the bathroom, he passed the vanity mirror. His reflection was almost frightening.
"I look like a crazed serial killer."
Whatever happened to the handsome boy who had played centerfield for his high school baseball team and who had taken the popular co-captain of the varsity cheerleading squad to the prom?
"That was almost twenty years ago," he said with sudden realization. "I've wasted nearly half of my life trying to get over what happened to me in Iraq. I've got to start taking better care of myself. I don't want to end up like Sy Jeter, Vern Dawson and all my other old buddies."
After a shave, a long hot bath, clean clothes, a couple of aspirins and a cup of strong coffee, Denny felt almost human again. He rolled over to the desk and turned on the computer, hoping to find another invitation from M'Lady Enchantress, but there was none. It was pretty pathetic, he thought, that the only mystery and excitement in his monotonous life had turned out to be nothing more than a clever advertising campaign. Or perhaps it had been some adolescent prank, the modern equivalent of those crank phone calls that asked if one's refrigerator was running.
With only mild interest, he read the usual jokes from his friends, deleted the spam and even passed over the newsletters from adult-oriented sites. He just was not interested in them lately.
Without warning, his headache returned with a vengeance. He tried massaging his temples, but it offered no relief from the pain. The only cure would be to take some Advil and go back to bed.
Denny clicked the shut-down button on his computer. Suddenly, a flash of light exploded across his screen, and he felt an electric shock race through his body. The feeling was not unlike the one he had when the car bomb went off in Iraq; only this shock contained a strange mixture of pain and pleasure.
As the ibuprofen kicked in, the pain subsided, and he felt himself slipping away. His last conscious memory was of a sweet, lyrical voice emanating from his computer: "Welcome to the Realm of Magic, M'Lord."
The following day a former marine who served during Operation Desert Storm logged onto the private chat room.
"Bad news," he began typing. "Denny Brinkman will not be joining us anymore. Chalk up another casualty, boys."
* * *
Kate had no choice but to cancel her Internet service. It was a desperate move, but she had been out of work for eight weeks already, and she could barely make ends meet. Until she got another job, she would have to go to the library and wait in line to use the computers there.
I'm still connected until tomorrow, she thought as she clicked on the Internet Explorer icon one last time.
Her home page came up in all its beauty, with the colorful, multi-tiered, background and shimmering animated images. But something was decidedly different. Rather than the pixie-like faerie who usually greeted her and fellow web surfers, there was a handsome, middle-aged man, dressed in fine breeches and a velvet doublet worthy of a king.
"M'Lady Enchantress," he said with a dazzling smile. "I have come to escort you to the Realm of Magic."
* * *
A group of somber-faced women gathered around the coffee machine in the lunchroom of Providential Insurance.
"The cause of death was listed as heart failure," Lorna Sholto said cynically. "I never knew Kate McMahon had any heart problems. I think she was depressed over losing her job and ... and ...."
She did not finish her sentence.
Most of the women cast accusing glances at Rena Dolman, who sat quietly eating her lunch, deliberately ignoring those around her. After all, it was not her fault that Kate had no life beyond her job and her computer. God knows she would never have killed herself over something as meaningless as being laid off. Rena finished her salad and then stretched out her left hand straight in front of her, looking at the diamond ring that glistened on her third finger and taking comfort in the knowledge that she would not end up like poor Kate.
* * *
Ten years passed, and an aging, overweight Rena Ketchel turned on her computer. Sadly, marriage had not been all that she had hoped. Her senior partner accountant husband was having an affair with his administrative assistant, and Rena was left alone in her five-bedroom house with only her eight-year-old son and her computer for company.
Princess Azure Moon, as Rena was known to her online friends, went to the one-stop voting page to cast her daily vote in the website competitions to which she belonged. But instead of the roster of sites competing in the Divine Ladies of the Netherworld category, a link appeared announcing "Welcome to the Realm of Magic."
"What's this? Another competition?"
Curious, she clicked on the link.
Rena did not understand the technology behind the images she saw. She could not distinguish a JPEG from a Java applet, but she watched with fascination as two people frolicked merrily against a Camelot-like background of rolling, green hills and a towering, stone castle. A handsome, middle-aged man in a velvet doublet ran up one of the hills toward a princess in a jeweled gown. The man laughed heartily, as though the simple act of running gave him great pleasure. The lady watched as her lord approached, her eyes alive with love and happiness.
Rena adjusted her glasses. There was something familiar about the woman's face. It reminded her of Kate McMahon, the poor girl whom everyone assumed had killed herself in a fit of depression. But the woman on the screen was slender and beautiful.
Rena wanted to continue watching, to see the handsome lord take his lady in his arms, but the screen went blank, and the voting page reappeared. Rena checked the box alongside the name of her site, typed in her email address and clicked on the submit button. As the voting page faded and the thank you screen appeared, Rena heard a strange, lyrical voice coming from her computer: "The Realm of Magic is waiting for you."
Salem loves to practice magic. He's become quite adept at making food disappear!
