The Key to Everything

by Alex Kimmell

  “Her eyes stopped smiling…but her mouth never moved.” Abram turns his back to Emily. She watches the back of his head and strains to hear him speaking. “It looked like…I think she winked at me…then he was back. His head was tilted on its side, pressing his right ear flat down against his shoulder. He opened his mouth so wide…it was too wide. Something was moving inside of there. I backed away from the door. I sat against the toilet. They were still in my eyes. I blinked, but instead of the darkness, the two of them stayed right where they were in front of me.”

  At first, Emily thinks she just can’t hear him because he is so quiet. Then she realizes he stopped talking. She stands up and walks over to him, placing a hand on his shoulder. He reaches up and squeezes her fingers.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “You can stop if you want.”

  “No.” He turns around and faces her again. “I could see them standing right there in front of me. I’ve tried so hard to make myself think that I dreamed this…but it was real. Does any of this make sense?”

  “I…I think so.” She believed him. Standing in this room that shouldn’t be here, she found that she actually believed him. “What happened next?”

  “They just stood there for a while…staring at me. I heard the sound of film whirring through an old movie projector and watched him flicker in and out of focus. One second they were on the other side of the room, and suddenly they were right on top of me.” He jumps as if he can see the two of them in this room now. “Some sort of paw with long black claws reached out and gripped the edges of his teeth. It latched on and pulled until another reached out and clamped onto his chin.”

  He talks faster now. Trying to get as many words out with each breath as he can. Even as he inhales, the words continue to flow, so they won’t be lost or forgotten.

  “Loud static clicking echoed from the walls and the porcelain tub. I felt my eardrums pounding inside of my skull. Mom stood there, just smiling and facing forward. Brown and black fur stuck to the edges of his lips as they crawled out. Some were wet and sticky, with splotches of pink hairless skin on their arms or backs. There were scars and bite marks all over their bodies.

  “They were on her so quickly…Teeth like knives tore at her flesh. Muscles and veins hung in between loose skin…it hung like the laundry on the line in the backyard… leaking thin tubes dripped from her body. Pieces of her were stuck on fangs and carried back into the static hissing inside my brother’s mouth. Her eyelids were ripped and pulled… jagged tatters of skin above her eyebrows.

  “She stared straight at me… while the life was slowly eaten away from her. I watched…and I cried. I watched her dismantled piece by piece until there was nothing left. Eventually the last one crawled back into his mouth and the static disappeared….I watched him…finish…chewing. He tilted his head slowly back up and then smiled at me. He winked, blew me a kiss and flickered off.”

  “Jesus.” Emily holds her hand to her chest. Feeling woozy, she leans against the key-covered wall to maintain her balance.

  “I ran down the hallway and turned to my mom’s room to wake her up…but she was gone.” Abram’s empty eyes stare down at the floor, sending droplets into the small, moist Rorschach pattern building near his feet. “The bed was empty. All of the walls were empty. My lock was gone. Everything that I had created over the last year was wiped away.

  “I called out for her and ran through the entire house, watching the blur of clean walls rush past me. I opened the door and fell to my knees on the smooth, clean, untouched dirt.” He leans on the wall in front of Emily and puts his hands on her cheeks. “Remember when I told you before that I made keys that open things?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, sometimes they open things that should stay locked up.”

  Emily stares at Abram for a long time. Quiet in the room but for their breathing, the keys hang hushed on their hooks. Abram lowers his hands to his sides and sits down on the floor.

  “What was his name?”

  “Who?”

  “Your brother.” Emily crosses her arms, hugging herself, and digs her fingers deep into the flesh of her triceps. The skin turning white at her knuckles, she asks the question again. “What was his name?”

  Abram sighs and breathes out so softly the word barely even came out as a whisper. “Jabez.”

  -46-

  Abram: Man of His Words

  Emily let him cry for a little while. His head dropped down, chin to chest, eyes open sending more than a handful of tiny droplets to the floor. Her ears imagined small explosions while she watched as water arched through the air in violent displacement from the puddle. A tiny rainbow curled above, in the dim light from the 40-watt bulb hanging high in the center of the room.

  His breathing slowed and steadied its rhythm eventually. After he calmed down, he looked at her. He didn’t have to say he was sorry for dragging her and her family into this. Each twitch of his eyelashes read a novel’s worth of apologies. And though she was not in the mood for forgiveness, she needed him. Auden needed him. Jason and Jeremy needed him. Reluctantly, she put her arms around Abram and held him tight. She rocked him slowly back and forth, whispering, “Shh. Shh. Shh.”

  He pulled away slowly with a meek, little-boy smile. He held out his arm and showed her the tattoo. For the first time, Emily really looked at it. She took his hand and leaned her face down close to his skin. The outline of it looked like an old-fashioned keyhole. Next to his wrist it was perfectly round. Toward the bottom of the circle two straight lines angled out and headed back toward his elbow. They spread wider apart until they ended one quarter of an inch before the large elbow joint folds of skin. One more straight line crossed over the arm, joining them together horizontally across his forearm, finishing the familiar shape.

  While the outline was smooth and well-executed, drawn with excellent craftsmanship, what covered the inside was what was truly remarkable. Lines and curves of black and grey drew a symphony of gears and levers. Smaller and finer than any painting Emily had ever seen, they moved into and out of each other. A gear turned, pushing a rod up and down, which moved a lever that spun another gear. On and on the connections grew, forward and back, interlocking and pulling her eyes deeper into the skin.

  It was mesmerizing. Soothing, like a lullaby in her chest. She reached her finger out to touch it and feel the astonishing beauty. Abram pulled his arm away, jarring Emily from her reverie.

  “No.” The words almost hurt her ears when he spoke. It was not their volume, but their meaning. “You don’t have the key.”

  “Which one?” Emily blinked hard to clear her eyes back to the here and now, and looked up around the walls filled with keys.

  “The one back there.” He lifted his head, and she knew what he meant.

  “We have to go back out there? That’s fucking crazy.” Back into herself now, she felt the fear’s full kick in her gut at the thought of heading back out into that kitchen. “That place is full of those things. And…and Gene…Sgt. Harmon… whatever he is. Just make another one while we’re in here, where it’s safe.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “Gene has it.”

  “You’re fucking kidding, right?”

  He shakes his head back and forth.

  “Is he Jabez?”

  “No.” Abram’s eyes burn holes through Emily. The old man lifts his hands and takes a deep breath. “That man is not my brother.”

  Shifting on the newspaper, she leans back against the wall, sending several keys clinking to the floor. “All right, then. Who is he?”

  “I’m not sure. But he knows about the key. And I think he knows about Jabez.”

  “Knows what about Jabez? How could he? Isn’t your brother dead…a ghost or something?”

  “Yes and no.” Abram walks over to the wall in front of him and brushes his fingertips along a row of the keys, creating a small symphony of high-pitched, bell-like tones, muffled by the closeness of the
walls. “All I thought about for most of my life was family. I met my Dedra and she gave me my beautiful girls. I thought that would be enough for me. I wanted it to be enough…”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “No. Every single time I passed a door, I fought the urge to bend down and peek through the keyhole.” He mimicked the movements of leaning down and put his hand above his eyes to shield them from the lights. “I was able to do it, too. For a long time, actually.” He grabbed a large brown key that was as long as his forearm. He held it reverently in his hands, cradling it like a small child. Then he dropped it to the floor. Emily’s body instinctively jumped, expecting an ear-shattering crash, but it made no sound at all. The heavy piece of metal nestled itself to the floor, as softly as a feather.

  “One day, when I was about seventeen, I went back to our old neighborhood, to the house where I was born. Obviously I didn’t need a key.” He waved his hand in a circle around the room and raised his eyebrows. “I let myself in at night, after the people who lived there went out. Other than the furniture, it was exactly the way I remembered it.” Abram’s eyes glazed over, not seeing Emily or the room anymore..

  * * *

  Abram walked around, looking at the walls and the old planks of wooden floors. The crown molding was starting to crack in the living room. The seventh stair creaked close to the banister, just like it did when he was a little boy. The sound was reassuring, almost soothing. He walked down the hall to what used to be his bedroom. The door was open, so he walked in and closed it behind. He kept his eyes open to let them get used to the dark.

  As he sat Indian-style on the floor, a strange glow lit up on his left side. His eyes followed it up to the source…shaped like a perfect, beautiful white keyhole. He got up to his knees and scooted across the floor to what he thought was a door.

  When Abram looked through it, the little boy was there. Jabez smiled, his arms reaching out. He was laughing, but there wasn’t any sound. Abram’s fingers fumbled into the pocket of his jeans and grabbed the key he had made especially for this moment. He backed up and slid the key into the hole. It fit perfectly, and he could feel the gears turning, like his own body was making them move. The door opened.

  Abram stood in the center of an all-white room. There was nothing there at all. No walls. No ceiling. No floor. No Jabez. He turned around in circles and couldn’t tell when he’d made it all the way around. Everything was white. All the air was sucked away, and every sound was silenced. Feeling numb…afraid and alone, he tried to scream.

  Paper. Pages and pages of brown paper flushed out of his mouth… hundreds of them. He couldn’t breathe. He choked and gagged. It hurt worse than any pain he had experienced before. The edges of his mouth were bleeding. His entire body was screaming. He thought he was going to pass out. It just kept coming… his eyes felt like they were going to pop out of their sockets. The pressure pushed so hard that the skin was stretching.

  When it finally ended, he collapsed on the floor. Paper lay scattered all around. His lungs were heaving to suck in as much air as they could take. He rubbed at his eyes and pushed at them with the heels of his palms to make sure they were still inside his head. Then Jabez was standing right in front of him.

  Jabez’s chin pressed deep into his chest as he looked down at the pages twirling around his feet. Abram could only see the top of his head but could tell his mouth was open. All of a sudden, Jabez breathed in, and the pages rushed together in front of Abram into a neat stack. Jabez went down on one knee and put his palm on top of the pile. His skin began to wrinkle. He was shrinking without getting smaller. Slowly the pages sucked him in. He hollowed, and it looked like every bit of him inside the skin went into the paper.

  Abram could see words appearing from nowhere on the stacked sheets. The more words that showed up, the less of Jabez remained in his skin. Though the pages were stacked several hundred deep, Abram could see the words filling every single one of them. Words…words…words…kept coming. Some of the pages became so full that they were almost completely black. Letters overlapping and taking up space, whether they were legible or not.

  Then it stopped. The stack remained still and silent. A few pieces of paper twisted with their corners sticking out, appearing brown and old, splotched with mold around the edges or covered in a film of mildew.

  Abram could still feel Jabez there, that kind of feeling you get when you turn to see if someone’s standing behind you, but nobody’s there. The only thing left of him was a pile of wrinkled skin, empty, with one hand still resting on top of the stack of pages.

  He couldn’t see it at first, but the skin was moving. The torso slid along the floor. Inching forward. Flesh wrapped itself over paper. First the stomach slid underneath the bottom of the stack. Then legs and arms covered the spine, and his head made the cover. When it was finished, the book took a deep breath and exhaled out through the pages. It smelled old…rotted.

  Abram was back in his old bedroom, sitting on the floor with the book on his lap. He could feel the slow rhythm of its heart beating and watched the cover rise and fall beneath his palm. He stood up, put the book under his arm, opened the door, walked down the stairs, and left the house.

  Abram walked for miles. Carrying the book under his arm through the city. People he passed stepped in wide circles around him. This man did not appear outwardly threatening; in fact, he looked terribly alone and sad. A cloud of dread floated in the air around him, affecting everyone who came near. Children playing on the sidewalk ran back to their homes, crying for no discernable reason. Dogs romping free in backyards whimpered, tails down, and crawled back in through dog doors or beneath bushes to hide. Drivers’ vision blurred, mistaking red lights for green. Motorcycles fell to their sides, ripping through leather, denim, and fragile skin along rough pavement. Busses drove past their stops and through pedestrian-filled crosswalks. More accidents were reported along the route Abram walked on that day than on any other in recent memory.

  Abram stepped rhythmically, oblivious to the goings-on around him. He went to his apartment, put the book down on the floor in the middle of the single small room, and didn’t leave for days. He stared at it. He touched it. He smelled it. He rested his ear against the cover. He listened. He didn’t eat or sleep. He couldn’t break away from this thing. It became everything. It started to become Abram himself.

  Abram woke one morning with his cheek pressed firmly into the book’s cover, drooling out of the corner of his cracked lips. He realized he needed to get rid of it. He went to the dresser and pulled out an old red ribbon that his mother used to tie her hair with. He tightly wrapped it around the book and tied it. He made a bow and then a knot with the loops. He took the last bus running that night, as far away from the city as it would take him before it turned back.

  He walked for miles. The new construction made houses all look the same. Trees lay in the street, uprooted to make way for this suburban utopia. He found one very old tree still standing by the side of a freshly poured foundation and started digging at the ground covering the roots. He didn’t have a shovel, so he used the heels of his shoes. When the rubber wore down, he used his hands until his fingers bled. A few nails chipped away, but he kept on going. He was so thirsty that his tongue and lips cracked. He couldn’t feel his fingers anymore. He stopped and threw his brother in the hole and covered him up with dirt. When he was finished, he jumped on the spot to push it down some more and screamed at the top of his lungs. He roared to the leaves in the tree and to the black of the night sky.

  He tried to hitch a ride back home but couldn’t blame anyone for passing by, with the way he looked. He didn’t get home until sunset the next day. He turned on the shower and fell into the corner with all his clothes on and cried. The hot water didn’t last long, so by the time the landlord let herself in to find out why the neighbors below were complaining about their leaky ceiling, Abram was all pruned up, sitting in the corner under the falling water, shivering. She called the hospital, and t
hey held him there for three months until he was able to speak again. By the time they released him, it was all a dream.

  -47-

  Auden: White

  Jeremy looks at you with puffy, bloodshot eyes. It takes great effort for him to blink. It causes him significant pain. You wink at your little boy, and he manages to break a smile through the stiff, bloated skin. He’s obviously scared and has been crying quite a bit.

  You want to go over to him. You want to wrap your arms around and hold him. Sing to him. Soothe him and make him feel better. Your body doesn’t respond to your commands anymore. Your limbs are stiff and solid. You can’t feel your hands or feet at all. Your head won’t turn or look down, and your peripheral vision is not wide enough to let you see anything below your cheeks.

  You stop struggling and look back over to Jeremy. You try to signal with your eyes that he should come over to you. He shakes his head and looks downward. That’s when you notice it. There is no blanket covering his legs on the mattress. From head to torso, he looks perfect. The beautiful, happy five-year-old boy you adore. But starting just below his bellybutton, his skin spreads gently out and disappears into the bed. His legs melted away.

  You cry and pull at your arms to reach out for him, but nothing moves. No matter how hard you pull, you can’t jar yourself loose from the wall. You realize why and finally give up. Everything is white. All white. Jeremy is white. The redness flows away from his eyes; the swelling goes down. He blends in with everything behind, in front, above, below. White is everywhere.

  -48-

  Emily: Resolute