Unlocking

She eases her hand into the sack of keys and sighs, entwining her fingers with their teeth, tracing their curves. Sometimes the bag contains candles, or shoes, and one terrifying day, a bushel of indistinguishable grains of wheat. She hid the bag for weeks after that incident, afraid to touch it, until chiming proclaimed a change to bells.

Mostly, though, it’s keys.

There are old-fashioned crooked ones, cheap store-cut keys that bend in her strong fingers, tiny ones for lockets, some that are big enough to lock a city’s gates, iron keys, plastic keys. Once, she found the key to Baba Yaga’s house, carved from a chicken’s leg bone, with a few scraps of gristle still clinging to it. She was relieved to find its door quickly.

Some days she loses herself in the sheer pleasure she gets from rolling her hands through the sack, but she remains sensible today. The trick of choosing a key is to not allow a beguiling notch or a tempting texture to lull her into picking a favorite. It has to be random or it isn’t fair. She thinks about what she will eat for lunch today—a tomato-from-the-garden and mozzarella sandwich?—and allows her fingers to close over the next key that their questing tips touch.

Pulling out her prize, she examines it, trying to guess what door it will open. She is sometimes wrong—often wrong, to be truthful—but she likes to guess anyway. The easiest ones to pick out are the car keys, and glass keys always unlock the odder doors. This key is neither.

It’s made of brass, that much she can tell, and it stinks of grease—no, oil. She rubs her dirty fingers on her shorts and turns the key over to trace the filigree engraved in its squat design. Something seems wrong with it, and it takes her a few moments to realize that there aren’t any teeth on it. The shape—a butterfly—rings a bell in her memory, but nothing solid.

She shakes her head and shrugs. The guessing game is fun, but it’s not really important, and she does have other things to attend to.

Grabbing a large bottle, she fills it with sweet mint tea, still warm from brewing in the sun. She once spent four days searching for the proper lock of a nondescript steel key. The hallucinations she rode for the next week as her body rehydrated had been interesting, but she doesn’t want to relive the experience. As an afterthought, she makes her sandwich as well with thick slices of cheese and tomato and munches on it as she walks to the room.

“The room” is how she always thinks of it, the words outlined and in block letters in her mind, casting a sort of shadow. She is a bit nervous of it, because, well. . . the sack changes, and that is strange, but at the end of the day, it’s still just a bag. If she really needed to get rid of it, a quick drive to the county dump would probably do the job. But the room is always there, except when she has friends over or when she invites the meter reader in for coffee, and it is far more worrisome. It’s probably silly to think this about a part of her own house, but so it is.
It is for this reason that she, with a sheepish but determined expression hovering on her face the entire time, installed the several bolts that she shoots back now. She has to shove her bottle under her arm to hold it as she negotiates the bolts, always stiff no matter how much oil she pours on them. And she thinks—oil from bolts. Is that why the key is filthy?

The door opens outward; inside she just has to lean against it to leave. It is a little too big for the hall, so she holds the door to avoid scraping the walls and slips inside, finishing the remains of her sandwich.

Just as the bag is mostly full of keys, so is the room usually full of doors. Small doors, about the size of a post office’s post-boxes, each of them a different shape and color. Some have been here for a long time, and she runs her fingers over them as she enters. The one door that is a different size, a tiny opening made of different wood splinters all jigsaw-ed together, with no door handle but a huge lock. Her favorite door, a cheerful red barn door with morning glories growing over it with a lock and handle worn from use. The door that is pure marble, smooth as ice and just as cold, with two gold handles and no visible lock. She suspects that it may only appear when its key does, and leaves it alone. It’s the sort of door built by the sort of important people who don’t like less important people touching their things.

Other doors, though familiar, she avoids. The barred one, composed of tight railings that sometimes allow flashes of red to shine through, she does not touch. Nor does she go near the pair of doors that have a chain running between their locks. One is spongy and warm and radiates lust; the other is covered in precious stones in designs that shift if she looks at them for too long. She wishes they would go away and but also hopes that she never finds their keys; there are some doors that should not be opened.

Most of the doors disappear even before she finds their key, so that the walls flicker with a cascade of change. She winces at the loss, but she has to follow the rules, or it wouldn’t mean anything. It’s the price she pays for her stewardship.

Rubbing her shoulder, she sets the tea down in the corner, taking a sip before screwing it shut. She weighs the strange key in her hand, twisting her head to examine its markings. Frowning, she takes in the state of the current doors.

Logic would suggest one of the stranger porticos. Walking up and down the length of the walls, she bites her lip and surveys the choices. The first time, she methodically worked her way from one corner to the other. After a week of this, she found the orange plastic door—labeled with a photograph of its key. Now she does an overview before she begins.

She pulls a piece of chalk out of her pocket and marks likely candidates. This brass one with a grate, a stained glass window, and a letterbox is a possibility, as is the one that looks like the door to a tent and is scrawled all over with Arabic. Sometimes she’s wrong on her initial guesses, and has to check the hard way, but at least she can make a start. She rejects a few doors out-of-hand—not that one, it’s a car—but makes sure, crossing them off as she is proven correct.

Humming, she scans the next wall. No. . . no. . . ah! She smiles and beelines it over to the square brass door holding the key up to it. The designs match and the lock on this door is a circle instead of the usual crooked shape. She slips the key inside and hears the satisfying click of an unlocking internal mechanism.

After the usual half-turn, she tugs at the small knob in the corner, but it sticks fast. Confused, she turns the key more, and after the third revolution her face lights up in understanding. Not just a key—a wind-up key. Enthusiastic now, she rotates the tool as fast as she can. It grows more difficult to turn as whatever is inside tightens, until finally she can’t move it anymore. A squeal comes from behind the door, then a few “boings.” Pressing her ear to the door, she listens to the clunk of gears starting up. She yanks at the knob again.

The whole door comes out of the wall and the section below it crumbles, the doors shifting on the wall to avoid the break. A pair of legs emerges, and she yelps, backing away. Arms crook out and hands press against the whole section of the wall, levering the body out of it.

A tall figure steps back and shakes itself, raising a cloud of plaster. She watches, fascinated, as it turns around, still dusting off bits of the ravaged wall, which is already knitting itself back together.

The figure—revealed to be a clockwork man—bows and tips his improbable top hat to her. Its sculpted face is too perfect, with glittering eyes that she suspects are cameras. They swivel with a faint grinding, presumably scanning the room, finally fixating back on her face. “Excuse me, miss. Do you happen to know where a man named Martyn Perwellyn is?”

The clear and human tone of its voice startles her. The rest of its body, though well-crafted, shows little attempt to match the art of its face. It’s beautiful in its own way, gleaming metal and intricate fastenings, but does nothing to make the clockwork man more lifelike. “Sorry?”

“Martyn Perwellyn. Do you know him? Have you heard of him?”

She shakes her head.

“Ah.” The voice sounds disappointed, though the face remains immobile in a slight smile. “Then, if you will grant me leave, I am afraid that I must depart, miss.”

“Oh—of course. Yes.” Shaken for reasons she doesn’t understand, she steps forward and holds her hand out to shake. “Nice meeting you. Uh, good luck finding him.”

Instead of shaking, he bows over her hand. “Thank you for your kind wishes.” Straightening, he strides to the door. She notices that his feet, the only clumsy part of him, clank on the wooden floor.

“Wait!” It takes her a moment to realize why she protests before she registers the wind-up key on the floor, having fallen out as he emerged from the wall. She kneels and picks it up. “I think you’ll need this.”

He turns back. “Ah. Yes. I must thank you again.”

She hurries forward and hands it to him. The metal of his hand is warm and smooth as her fingers brush against it. She smiles. “No problem.”

Opening the door, he tips his hat again and leaves.

It occurs to her that she probably should have shown him out, when she hears the sound of front door clicking shut and the fading noise of his clanking footsteps. She shrugs and goes to the corner, retrieving her now lukewarm tea. Unscrewing the cap, she takes a few gulps then leaves, ignoring the reappearance of the door that shakes from invisible knocking except to slam the bolts across with more violence than normal.

Then, because she’s been intending to do it for days, she paints the kitchen.