Secret Summers. Glynda Shaw
then pointed to the diary.
“Another mystery,” she agreed.
Recalling again the sounds from last night, I said, “I wonder if we should be messing around with these things.”
“A key was mentioned,” Monique reminded me. ”Now here’s a key. Besides we can’t spend all our time humoring some old specter!”
I’d always thought specter sounded a lot scarier than ghost did. ”I’ve got to sleep in here tonight,” I muttered.
“Oh, maybe your aunt will let you stay over at my place,” Monique said offhand. Thoughtfully she closed the diary.
As she did so, I recalled the lock on the chest and looked again at the tiny silver key laying there on the desk next to the burglary implements Monique had employed. I saw she was getting the same idea, but I picked it up first. The verse had appeared on the box and within the suitcase that had, mine or not, arrived with me in Oregon. Perhaps this key was never intended for the little diary at all. Maybe it was for opening something else.
“Help me get this stuff back in the suitcase,” I asked. We tumbled it all in except the diary, closing the lid. Feeling now as if I’d done this many times, I entered the closet and climbed up the ladder, the key clutched in my left hand, careful not to trip on my dress. Monique followed handing up the flashlight.
I studied the little brass plate set near the edge of the curving box lid, the edge opposite to the hinges. A keyhole-like opening looked a likely fit, but the key wouldn’t go in more than a quarter inch or so. I peered more closely at the lock and it seemed to me that there was no true keyhole, no hole for the key, just a kind of slot. Well, so much for the idea of a key opening this thing. Why would somebody build a box that couldn’t be opened? In frustration, I shook the box. It felt pretty heavy. I shoved at it. It gave maybe a fraction of an inch but wouldn’t slide. I braced myself and pulled at one end of the box back toward the opening in the attic floor. Something happened. The box turned slightly. I braced harder and pulled again. It turned a bit further. Then there was a little click or clunk, like something had dropped or sprung. I examined the lid, but nothing had happened except it seemed, when I again tried to lift the box, it was just a bit lighter, not light enough to lift off the floor though, and I’d gotten the idea by then that it was attached somehow to the floor beneath. I tried twisting the box some more, like screwing a plug out of a hole, but it wouldn’t move any more in that direction. I tried to screw it back the other way, and in a few seconds, I heard another clunk. ”I’m getting somewhere,” I whispered down to Monique, who of course clambered immediately up beside me. By twisting back and forth from release to release, I eventually worked loose what I’d come to think of as the locking plug and suddenly the box nearly leapt up off the floor, so much lighter had it become.
I gently turned the box over. There was a hole in the bottom, perhaps the size of a silver dollar. From the floor where the box had recently rested, was an inch or so of wooden peg projecting, the same size as the hole. The peg went down into a hole in the attic floor. The hole was square, not round like the peg. I took hold of the top of the peg and clamping my fingers about it, pulled upward. It came up a fraction of an inch but snapped back with a “clock” sound. There was obviously some sort of spring down at the base of the peg.
“Woo,” Monique said suddenly not troubling to whisper. ”Move the light closer. Look at that!” she pointed, and I saw the square head of a key just protruding from the top of the peg. This one was brass and more businesslike than the one from the suitcase, but when we tried the lock, it made no more headway than the silver key had on the diary.
“Why would anybody put a key in there if there’s no way to open the lock?” I demanded.
“’The key to things without,’” Monique said, “‘is that locked safe within.’ Maybe this isn’t the key to the box. Maybe it’s the key to something else?”
“To what then?” I asked. ”And just because it’s a key to things without, does that mean it doesn’t somehow open the box?”
Monique’s head wagged back and forth in the flashlight beam.
“’The thread that runs, however far,’” I tried, “’must tie yet end to end.’” I stared more closely at the peg. It had threads on it like a jar, sort of but not all going in one direction; rather they zigzagged back and forth. We had the box off the peg, but all we had for our trouble was a one-inch hole in the bottom of a hardwood box and a weirdly threaded peg sticking up out of the attic floor.
Another survey of the box showed that no screw heads or nails showed, no way to disassemble the thing.
“If only the open mind ‘can grasp things unknown’ … Grasp new things, I suppose that means,” Monique mused. ”Maybe we should think about locks for a while. What do we know about locks?”
“Well,” I said, “there’re lots of kinds of locks, but with a key lock, you put a key in a hole in the bottom or on one side and turn it, and it pushes something out of the way and lets the lock open.”
“And we can’t get the key in this side of the lock,” Monique supplied. ”What about the other side, I wonder.”
At first I didn’t get her. ”What other side?”
Monique tapped the top of our inscribed wooden box near its lock plate. ”This side,” she said. She turned the box over and poked her finger up through the hole in the bottom. An object inside shifted, thumping as she did so. ”Other side,” she said. My mouth hung open. ”Can I have the flashlight please?” I handed it over.
She played the light around the attic. ”Thought so,” she said. A length of dowel, grimed with age had been lying there on the floor, perhaps three feet from us, along with some ancient tools, mostly rusted, all of them dusty. ”I can’t see enough up here,” she said. “Let’s take this down the ladder.” Handing me the piece of dowel, she picked up the box and shook it. Again, a soft shuffling thud issued from within. ”Something in there,” she said.
Back down in my room, Monique laid the box on my bed, bottom up, exposing the hole again. It had a metal ring within it. Evenly spaced teeth pointed inward. These had obviously slid along the screwy grooves in the attic floor plug, which traveled only a little way, then doubled back on themselves.
“’The open hand alone,’” Monique said as if following on the heels of my own thought, “’can grasp the things unknown.’” She reached for the dowel I still held and studied it, turning it over. Slowly she slipped the square head of the brass key into a slot cut into one end. She shook the box again, dislodging whatever was inside, out of the way of the hole and slipped the dowel, key foremost, through the hole in the bottom of the box. Furrowing her forehead with concentration, she twisted the length of wood, adjusting back and forth, up and down. ”I feel something,” she declared, and a moment later, there was a metallic sproing and the box sprang open.
“’No question lies upon the tongue …’” I nearly shouted.
“’… with no answer nearby to be shown!’ Yes,” she laughed, clapping her hands. “We asked what a lock was and what it did, and since it didn’t work the way other locks we’ve known work, we found a whole new way of opening locks!” She was bending over the open box now. ”A book!”
A weathered, brown, leather-covered volume lay in the open box next to a pile of what looked at first sight like trash of some kind, material scraps, perhaps, rags at the extreme end of existence. Monique seized the book. The title on the front cover was all but obscured. She gently opened the book. Dust wafted from inside. The Watchful Eye, the title on the first page read. I stood behind her to read along. It appeared to be a story about a girl coming to live in a strange, dark house by the sea. From what I could gather, the girl didn’t appear all that happy being in this locale. There was something very frightening to her about it, though her grandfather, who seemed to be either a woodworker or a wizard—it wasn’t clear which—was kind and, within the means available to him, made this strange place comfortable for her.