The First Opening

No one now living remembers who first set it down. The earliest reference survives only as a marginal note in a burnt cadastre: a coffer, an inventor’s mechanism, a reliquary, a toy that laughs when opened. Each description contradicts the last; each is certainly a copy of some earlier mislaid account.

Its name is Arcamira.

This is where the record begins. The episodes that follow are the openings already witnessed, transcribed from correspondents whose credibility we cannot vouch for and cannot dismiss.

He has appeared in every century, always the same face, always unaged.

Court records from Prague mention a jester who never laughed. A Venetian inventory lists a servant paid in questions rather than coin. A daguerreotype from 1851 shows him at the edge of a curiosity-cabinet auction, standing slightly apart from the other bidders, as though he already knew what each lot contained.

He carries the key. He does not turn it. That courtesy is left, as it has always been left, to whoever the coffer decides upon next.

The caretaker has been seen to part with only one thing.

A London locksmith’s daybook for 1818 enters it as one skeleton key, pattern unknown, brought in for copying. No copy was made. The blank, he notes, would not take the file. An assayer in Antwerp was later asked to name the metal and declined to call it one. Each account gives the bow a different shape; all agree that it is warm.

He does not explain it. He sets it in an open hand, closes the fingers over it himself, and is not seen in that city again. Those who received it report the same small difficulty: it fits every lock they try, and opens none of them.

It was cut for a single aperture. No one has yet been told where that is.