#OriginalFiction – November 12

After breakfast, Dorian followed her to her room to examine the lock box. He spent a few minutes trying to pry it open with a letter opener, but to no avail. Like she had done previously, he shook it gently, trying to get an idea of what was inside, but there were no sounds of metal on metal, no feelings of lots of little things shifting around, just more of one soft thunk each time the box was turned over.

He mentioned the idea of just dropping it on the tile floor in the bathroom to see if that would break it open. She gave him a dirty look. “Just a thought,” he said with a shrug.

Finally, he agreed to go out to the shed.

It was still early enough that their mother was not up yet, so there was no need to explain what he was getting in the shed for. He simply grabbed a flashlight and the shed key from a drawer next to the back door and headed out to the shed.

She did not even watch him. The shed, filled with yard tools along with their grandfather’s things, gave her the creeps. She had accidentally been closed in there as a young child, trapped while their father mowed the lawn, unable to hear her crying and banging over the sound of the gas engine. She often wondered if that experience was why the magic had given her the ability to walk through walls.

Their grandfather had started collecting loose keys when he was a child. Sometimes, the keys had not been so loose, and there were a great many family legends about their grandfather getting into places he was not supposed to throughout his life. She often wondered if he had had the same magic she did, and just collected the keys as a way to cover it up. But the magic had never put her in a position of getting caught the way their grandfather supposedly had been.

While she waited for her brother to come back, she stared at the lockbox, as if trying to suddenly develop the ability to see through the metal to what was inside, or perhaps simply will the box into popping open. But nothing happened, other than her eyes got dry and itchy.

Dorian came back with a couple small bags of keys. They both knew they weren’t the only keys out there, but it was a start, and trying to remove all the keys at once would definitely be noticed, should their mother get into the shed for gardening tools, something very likely to happen on a Saturday in spring.

She dumped the first bag out. It had maybe 50 keys in it. A quick sort allowed her to pull out roughly half of them that were obviously the wrong kind of key for the lock. She spread out the remaining keys and passed her hand over them, hoping that maybe the magic would let her know which key it was. But she felt nothing. Which could mean it was not any of those keys, and she could safely set them aside, or it could mean that the magic let her walk through walls, nothing else. Sadly, the second seemed more likely. But, to give the magic one more chance, she closed her eyes and picked a key.

It did not fit in the lock. Neither did the next one, or the one after that. Dorian remained sitting on the edge of her bed, watching her, but he was starting to look bored.

“You could at least be sorting the next bag, pulling out the ones that are obviously not right.”

He rolled his eyes at her, but dumped out the second bag in a space clear from the keys in the first bag. Neither of them could have said why it was important that they not mix the keys from the different bags, no one would know that key A had been in bag X but was now in bag Z. But they both felt the need to keep things the way their grandfather had left them.

She was down to the last four keys from the first set when one slipped into the lock. She looked up at Dorian. He stared at the key. She turned it, or, rather, she tried to turn it. It would not move.